THE 

FAITH OF REASON, 
a Series of ^Discourses 

ON 

THE LEADING TOPICS OF RELIGION. 

/ 

By JOHN W. CHADWICK, 

AUTHOR OF "THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY." 




BOSTON: 
ROBERTS BROTHERS. 
1879. 



Copyright, 1879, 
By Roberts Brothers. 



University press : 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



My darling boy, kissed but a moment since, 

And laid away all rosy in the dark 

Is talking to himself. What does he say t 

Not much, in truth, that I can understand; 

But now and then, among the pretty sounds 

That he is making, falls upon my ear 

My name. And then the sand-man softly comes 

Upon him and he sleeps. 

And what am I, 
Here in my book, but as a little child 
Trying to cheer the big and silent dark 
With foolish words f But listen, O, my God, 
My Father, and among them thou shalt hear 
Thy name. And soon I too shall sleep. 
When I awake I shall be still with thee. 



r 




PREFACE. 



' I "'HIS volume is made up of a series of 
discourses preached in rapid succession 
to my own people in the months of January 
and February, 1879. It may be that some 
apology is due to the general reader for the 
directness of their form, and for some passages 
that make him a party to the confidential talk 
of a minister to his congregation. But the fact 
that the volume is printed in accordance with 
the expressed desire of my habitual hearers, 
and is intended primarily for their perusal, is 
my excuse for retaining the original form of 
its constituent parts. If reason as well as 
excuse is needed, let it be that the directness 
of their method is so deeply implicated in the 
various discourses, that to eliminate it wholly 



8 



PREFACE. 



would be to change their character so much 
that with less trouble I could re-write the entire 
series. I am persuaded that the form will 
prove no serious embarrassment to the general 
reader. Besides I have no desire to make the 
volume appear other than it is, — a collection 
of discourses on the leading topics of religion, 
written with reference to current discussions, and 
in answer to questions put to me by the more 
earnest and thoughtful members of my con- 
gregation. 

Brooklyn, October 25, 1879. 



CONTENTS. 



Entrotmctorg JBfecourgeg. 



PAGE 

I. Agnostic Religion 13 

II. The Nature of Religion 41 

STfie jFattf) of Eeagon. 

III. Concerning God 72 

IV. Concerning Immortality 113 

V. Concerning Prayer 161 

VI. Concerning Morals 209 



INTRODUCTORY DISCOURSES. 



I think man's soul dwells nearer to the East, 
Nearer to morning's fountains than the sun ; 
Herself the source whence all tradition sprang, 
Herself at once both labyrinth and clew. 
The miracle fades out of history, 
But faith and wonder and the primal earth 
Are born into the world with every child. 

Lowell. 

That one Face does not vanish, rather grows ; 
Or decomposes but to recompose; 
Becomes my Universe that feels and knows. 

Robert Browning. 

0 Power, more near my life than life itself, 

1 fear not thy withdrawal ; more I fear, 

Seeing, to know thee not, hoodwinked with dreams 
Of signs and wonders, while, unnoticed, thou 
Walking thy garden still, commun'st with men, 
Missed in the commonplace of miracle. 

Lowell. 



I. 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 

" £^NE can begin so many things with a new 
person," says George Eliot, " even to be 
a better man." Why not with a new year as 
well as with a new person? Somehow the aspect 
of the season seems to' lend itself to thoughts of 
hope and cheer. The outward aspect of the 
days is hardly any different from those immedi- 
ately preceding. The sun rises a few minutes 
later than it did, and lengthens out each day a 
little at the end; a lazy way of lengthening 
his days, at first, as if it came a little hard to 
him. But the inward aspect somehow is not 
the same. A week ago, the backward look was 
natural, but now the forward look is so. Even 
those of you who have fared the worst of late 
are beginning to see light ahead. The fresh 
new year shall see you on your feet again be- 
fore it die, and marching on to victory. 



14 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

What I propose to do this morning is to avail 
myself of this courageous attitude in which you 
find yourselves, and invite your attention to a 
subject which would not perhaps have been 
appropriate to the more sombre mood which 
was engendered by your old-year meditations. 
I am aware that such a course is open to the 
objection that it is a sort of death's-head at the 
feast ; but I remember that the purpose of that 
same death's-head was not to chill the merri- 
ment, but rather to encourage it with a some- 
what grim and yet good-natured carpe diem — 
Seize on to-day. What I wish to do is to con- 
sider certain tendencies of modern thought; also 
the goal to which they seem to tend ; and then 
to ask as fearlessly and answer as frankly as 
possible the question, Supposing that these 
tendencies go on and ultimate, will there be 
any thing left to mankind that can properly be 
called religion ; and, if so, will it be any thing 
that will be worth the sympathy and loyalty of 
earnest and true-hearted men and women? 

The tendencies to which I refer are far less 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 



noticeable here in America than they are in 
England and upon the Continent. Or perhaps 
a truer statement would be that here they attain 
to much less frequent and important literary ex- 
pression. But, before going further, I am in duty 
bound to state what tendencies I have in mind. 
They are not such as have for their objective point 
the denial of the dogmas of our popular theology, 
nor even such as contravene its fundamental 
assumption of the supernatural origin of Chris- 
tianity. Those tendencies are ubiquitous and 
positive enough, but their significance is slight 
in comparison with other tendencies, hardly less 
ubiquitous and hardly less positive. But these 
attain to much less frequent and expansive and 
well-ordered literary expression. They have no 
respectable organ here in America, so far as I 
am able to discover. "The Index," which is 
edited by my noble friend Francis Ellingwood 
Abbot, is certainly respectable ; but it is not the 
organ of agnosticism, of nescience, much less 
of dogmatic denial. Mr. Abbot himself is not 
an atheist, but a rational theist, able he thinks 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



to give a reason for the faith that is in him. 
Nevertheless, the tendencies which I have in 
mind find more conspicuous expression in his 
paper than in any other of equal intellectual 
force and general refinement. 

These tendencies, as I have now sufficiently 
implied, are those whose ultimate goal is the 
denial of any positive reality corresponding to 
the terms, God, Immortality, Prayer. Of private 
expression of these tendencies here in America, 
there is certainly no lack. And, judging from 
my personal experience, for every person affected 
by these tendencies a dozen years ago, there are 
a score affected by them now. Notably scien- 
tific men, albeit professors in the most orthodox 
colleges, and regular attendants upon such 
" means of grace " as are provided by the col- 
lege authorities for the benefit of the rising gen- 
eration, confess to you when they are off duty 
that, corresponding to the words which I have 
named above, they are aware of no substantial 
meanings. Even the late Professor Agassiz, 
who, in default of better, publicly attacked Dar- 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 



17 



win with the ad captandum argument, " We are 
not the children of monkeys : we are the chil- 
dren of God," said to me privately in just so 
many words, " Mr. Chadwick, the scientific man 
knows nothing about God." But the tendencies 
which I have named are not confined to scien- 
tific men. I find them everywhere where there 
are thoughtful men and women ; not such as are 
hilariously happy in their discovery that there is 
no God, no immortality, and that every spoken 
prayer is so much wasted breath, though many 
such there are ; but there are also those to whom 
the loss of these convictions and ideas out of 
their anxious lives is an immeasurable sorrow, 
who yet, because they cannot or think they can- 
not honestly retain them, with moistened eye and 
trembling lip bid them a sad farewell. There 
is one man here in America, who, better perhaps 
than any other, publicly represents the tenden- 
cies I have in mind ; in whom indeed, if I am 
not mistaken, they have reached their ultimate 
goal of absolute nescience. I refer to Mr. Felix 
Adler. Refined, scholarly, reverent, intensely 



1 8 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

moral, ardently benevolent, with a genuine en- 
thusiasm for humanity, he does not say, There 
is no God, There is no immortality, but he does 
say, If there be a God or immortality, we have 
no knowledge of the one or of the other, and 
he says that prayer is a survival of beliefs which 
we no longer entertain, with which it ought to 
be discarded. 

. In some respects, England is a much freer 
country than the United States. The tyranny of 
public opinion is much more repressive here than 
there. It is quite possible that there is much less 
of Mr. Adler's style of thought here than in Eng- 
land. But what there is, is much more timid in 
its expression here than there. There, there is so 
much of it, and it has grown so much of late, that 
they have made a new word to express it, — agnos- 
ticism {a is the negative, and gnosticism means 
knowing or knowledge; and so agnosticism is 
literally not knowing, and an agnostic is one who 
does not know). The creation of these words, 
and the frequent use of them of late, — you must 
all of you have come upon them many times, — 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 1 9 

are signs of the increasing prevalence of the 
things which they denote. The increasing use 
of the word nescience y the negative opposite of 
science in its primitive sense, knowledge, is 
another finger pointing in the same direction. 
Those of our periodicals which reprint the most 
striking English articles introduce to the Ameri- 
can public many of the agnostic articles that ap- 
pear in England, but only a small proportion of. 
them all. To one who follows up the course of 
English thought in the reviews and magazines 
pretty closely, nothing is more impressive than 
the extent to which the agnostic element pre- 
vails in such literature, as well as in scores of 
books, and the rapidity with which it has in- 
creased within a dozen years. The " Fort- 
nightly Review " is virtually the organ of 
agnostic thought, and its editor, John Morley, 
is a man whose culture and ability are second 
to no man's in Great Britain. But his re- 
view does not monopolize all the agnosticism. 
It appears in the " Contemporary " and the 
" Nineteenth Century," side by side with the 



20 THE FAITH OF REASON. 



pretentious vaporings of cardinals and bishops. 
It appears almost everywhere. Men of the high- 
est social, scientific, and literary rank make no 
concealment of their utter lack of faith in any 
God or immortality. And what is so obvious in 
Great Britain will shortly be so in America. If 
you and I were cowards, we should try perhaps 
to blink these facts, to make believe that no 
such facts exist. But they would exist just the 
same for all our cowardliness and lying. How- 
ever it may be with others, whatever faith / have 
must be in spite of all that I can hear or read 
against it. If I should catch myself wilfully try- 
ing to believe one thing or another, not seeking 
for the truth, but seeking for arguments to bol- 
ster up some preconceived opinion, I should be 
ashamed ever to face you in this place again. 
Very likely, if I had avoided all the way along 
every book of less conservative aspect than my 
own thought, I might have remained just where 
I was a dozen years ago, or even have gone the 
way of various others, back to the flesh-pots of 
the popular theology. And it may be that I 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 



21 



have read too exclusively the most iconoclastic 
writers who have challenged my beliefs. If it 
has been so, you may at least congratulate your- 
selves that the opinions which I have presented 
to you have not been drifted to my feet by any 
tide of mere conventionality, but have been 
plucked out of the teeth of danger, and fought 
for upon many a painfully contested field. 

From twelve' to twenty years ago, when the 
supernatural theory of Christianity, the special 
inspiration of the Bible, and so on, were being 
summoned sharply to the bar of reason, there 
were those who said that the process of negation 
would not end with any of these things. It 
would go on, they said, till it involved the faiths 
of natural religion in a common ruin with super- 
natural Christianity. But those who said these 
things were, like Cassandra, doomed to have 
their prophecies habitually disbelieved and dis- 
regarded. I know that I for one did not be- 
lieve them or regard them. The supernatural, 
I thought, was but a parasitic growth, which 
had sucked, was sucking, and would suck, 



22 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



the life out of natural religion. Destroy this 
parasitic growth, thought I, — and I was one 
of many who thought so, — and natural re- 
ligion would at once renew its youth, bourgeon 
and blossom out as it had never done before, 
and bear such fruit of joy and blessing as 
had never gladdened the eyes and fed the hun- 
gry hearts of men since time began. But the 
Cassandras were right. Supernatural religion 
has everywhere lost its hold on the intelligence 
of the civilized world, and so has natural re- 
ligion, too, in any such concrete shape as men 
imagined its triumphant future. If Theodore 
Parker, for example, could come back to us, he 
would confess that things had taken quite a dif- 
ferent turn from that which he anticipated and 
predicted. He would find a thousand ready to 
accept his anti-supernaturalism where he found 
a score when he was in the flesh. But would he 
find them all as confident as he was of a perfect 
God, a glorious immortality ; all of them ready 
to sanction his old-time prayers, wherein he 
talked with God as naturally and simply as a boy 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. ■ 23 

with his own mother? No, he would not. He 
would find in many instances that these things 
which were more dear to him than his own life 
had gone the way of -others which were to him 
hateful and intolerable to the last degree. I am 
sure that Mr. Froude does not exaggerate when 
he says that there is silently transpiring in our 
midst a more important change in thought than 
any which the world has undergone since the 
downfall of Paganism and the conversion of the 
Roman Empire.. I doubt if he would have ex- 
aggerated if he had said that even this was less 
important than the change which is at present 
going on. 

Now it is no part of my scheme this morning 
to state the arguments for or against one or the 
other of those great doctrines which have here- 
tofore been deemed essential to religion. I will 
only say that, because the tendency of late has 
been so strong either to dogmatic denial of these 
doctrines or to agnostic inability to assent to 
them, it does not follow that this tendency is 
absolutely just, and that we should all at once 



2 4 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



and all together abandon ourselves to it without 
reserve, as if its ultimate must be the final good. 
The tendency of thought at any given time may 
be in quite the opposite direction from that " final 
philosophy" which a Princeton Professor im- 
agines he has discovered and condensed into one 
bulky volume, but which is still, I fancy, far, far 
ahead of us. There are those who speak as if 
the tendency of thought at any given time being 
discovered, there was nothing else for us to do, 
but drop our oars and let it bear us as it will 
upon its bosom. But sometimes there is nothing 
else for us to do, so we be men not things, than 
to contend against it with all our strength. And 
there is sometimes nothing else than this for us 
to do when the tendency of thought for the time 
being is towards the perfect. If it does not seem 
so to us, then we must go the other way. The 
band of Arctic explorers who patiently and pain- 
fully walked towards the North day after day, 
and then discovered they had been walking on 
an immense ice-floe all the time, which had taken 
them hundreds of miles southward, nevertheless 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 25 

did well to do just as they did. They knew the 
way their feet were going; they did not know 
there was a mighty current sweeping them at its 
own will. And so it often is with us. The 
mighty sweep of things, the ultimate tendency 
which gathers up into itself all aberrations and 
divergences, — just as a ship's course to her desti- 
nation all of her tackings on and off, — of this we 
cannot be aware. We are on an ice-floe of such 
vast extent that, with strained eye or telescope, 
we have never seen its utmost bound. What we 
can know is whether our own feet are keeping on, 
however wearily and painfully, towards that which 
seems to us to be the true and good. If they are 
doing this, then we may look the whole world in 
the face without one blush of shame. It is here, 
I think, that rationalists are often quite as narrow, 
quite as unjust, as the most bigoted supernatu- 
ralists. They blame this or that person for not 
going with them, when he does not go with them 
simply and only because they do not seem to 
him to be going towards the truth. Instead of 
blaming him for his refusal to accept their guid- 



26 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



ance, they should admire him for his steadfastness 
to personal convictions, — a nobler thing in any 
man than following, if this were possible, the ab- 
solute truth without such steadfastness. 

On the other hand, it is no less certain that if 
the facts which come within our ken seem hostile 
to those doctrines and ideas which we regard as 
mo'st essential to religion, seem wholly subver- 
sive of them, then there is nothing else for us to 
do but to accept this conclusion manfully and 
adjust our lives to it as best we can. Whatever 
is doubtful, one thing is certain, — that no real 
good can come to us except along the line of 
our own personal integrity of thought and deed. 
It may well be that the negations of the present 
time are but so many steps in a progress to some 
higher affirmation than the world has ever yet 
received. I believe this. In hours of higher 
sanity, of deeper thought, I seem to catch some 
glimpses of a far-off time when man shall have a 
thought of God, of immortality, of prayer, more 
grand and beautiful than any thought of these 
which has so far appealed to the intelligence of 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 2J 

men. But, however this may be, nothing remains 
for us but to accept that which we are convinced 
is true, to give up every thing which does not 
seem so any longer. It may be hard, but if it is 
our duty, then there is no more to say. And, 
however some of us may conscientiously abide 
in a more positive order of ideas, let us beware 
lest we should ever cast the faintest shadow of 
reproach on those who have been inwardly com- 
pelled to surrender every most distinctive article 
of natural religion as it has so far been conceived. 
If they are as narrow and bitter in their icono- 
clasm as others are in their conservatism, then 
we may blame their narrowness and bigotry. But 
you and I have many a friend whose agnosticism 
is complete, but whose fidelity to personal con- 
viction puts to shame our own and that of our 
most orthodox acquaintances. For such we 
have no words of blame, and even our pity seems 
to find no joint in their self-poise and self-respect 
which it can penetrate. 

The aim of my discourse is not to question the 
validity of any of the leading doctrines of religion, 



\ 



28 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



or to analyze the processes by which these doc- 
trines have lost their hold upon so many minds, 
but simply, facing, for the time, the fact that 
there are many minds on which their hold is 
broken, to ask, What then? Does any thing 
remain to such that can with any justness or 
propriety be spoken of as religion ; and, if so, 
what is the nature and the good of it? 

I find the question stated in a recent number 
of the " London Spectator " in a bit of verse : — 

" What is the good and what is the bad ? 

What is the perfectly true ? 
What is the end you live for, my lad, 

And what may I ask are you ? 
Unproven I fear is your heaven above ; 

Life is but labor and sorrow ; 
Then why should we hope, and why should we love, 

And why should we care for the morrow ? " 

And not only is the question put, but also 
the following answer : — 

" There may be a fight worth fighting, my friend, 

Though victory there be none ; 
And though no haven be ours at the end, 

Still we may steer straight on. 
And though nothing be good and nothing be bad 

And nothing be true to the letter, 
Yet a good many^things are worse, my lad, 

And one or two things are better." 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 29 

The scope of this question and answer is 
indeed somewhat wider than that of my own 
question as I have stated it above. These in- 
troduce the ethical problem from which so far 
I have kept myself clear. The average assump- 
tion of the agnostic thinker is that, when we 
come to ethics, we come to terra firma. But re- 
cently various writers have been arguing, very 
laboriously, to prove that morals are dependent 
on religion, and that with the dogmatic denial 
of God and immortality, or the agnostic refusal 
to make either of these affirmations, the ground 
of all morality is cut away under its feet. Into 
the merits of this controversy, I have been with 
you already. Suffice it now to say that we 
arrived at the conclusion that, whatever inspira- 
tion or incitement for ethical action resides in the 
convictions corresponding to the terms God and 
Immortality, the basis of morals is in the social 
life of man, — in the absolute necessity for men 
who are to live together in harmonious rela- 
tions to accept certain limits to their conduct, 
to forego certain acts, however pleasant, because 



30 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

they are anti-social in their nature, and to per- 
form certain others, however painful, because the 
social good demands them. The importance 
of moral actions does not lie in their determina- 
tion of the happiness or misery of individual 
men beyond the grave, but in their determina- 
tion of the happiness or misery of the agent and 
of society here in this present world. Instead 
of saying, therefore, " Let us eat and drink, for 
to-morrow we die," if we have no longer any 
faith in an immortal life beyond the grave, we 
should say, Let us eat and drink, temperately 
and wisely, for to-day we live, and shall live well 
or ill in part according as we manage well or ill 
this bodily structure which is so closely impli- 
cated with the fortunes of our intellect and will 
And as morality is not dependent on any theory 
of a future life, so is it not dependent upon any 
theory of God. That it is not dependent upon 
God, I do by no means say. For to my mind, 
in the last analysis, he is " the power not our- 
selves that makes for righteousness. " But 
whether a man conceives him so or not, he can- 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 31 

not but admit that there is such a power, and he 
may still be moral, intensely so, whatever theory 
he may have of it. Ay, though, with or without 
the adjunct of a God, a man should hold with 
Schopenhauer and Hartmann that this is the 
worst possible world, I do not see that the 
foundations of morality would even then be 
shaken. On the contrary, I have often won- 
dered if pessimism be not a better working 
creed than optimism. If this is the best possi- 
ble world, as Leibnitz taught, to endeavor to 
improve it would appear to be an idle task. 
But if this is the worst possible world, it still 
remains for us to better it a little if we can. 
So much then, at least, remains for the agnostic, 
— " mere morality.'' Of God and immortality 
he may not presume to speak, and prayer may 
seem to him an idle form of words. But duty 
still remains. He is still living in a social 
world where his own actions do not end in 
themselves, but affect the welfare of others in 
ever-widening circles and to the remotest gen- 
erations. The experience of innumerable gen- 



32 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



erations has wrought out for him a moral code, 
which, although still capable of further emenda- 
tion, is not to be lightly set aside. So much 
remains to the agnostic thinker. All arguments 
to the contrary are so many brilliant tours de 
force by which it is attempted to terrify men 
back into the beliefs they have discarded, — a 
process morally akin to threats of pincers, rack, 
and wheel. Let the a priori reasoner prove 
ever so conclusively that the unbelieving man 
cannot be moral, and lo, his next-door neighbor 
is an unbeliever, the whiteness of whose moral 
nature, the courage of whose moral action, puts 
his own to shame. Ah ! but, says Mr. Mallock, 
his morality is only a survival of the beliefs his 
ancestors once held. It is a convenient subter- 
fuge. An unbelieving community, we are as- 
sured, or one which had worked out the entire 
stock of its hereditary faith, would not be moral. 
Such a contingency is so remote that it is very 
safe to prophesy. Meantime what we are cer- 
tain of is, that men whose faith is of the smallest 
in those doctrines of religion which are consid- 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION'. 33 

ered most essential are moral peers of the most 
enthusiastic believers of their own or any other 
time. Of this we are entirely certain; about 
the other it remains to be seen. 

But there are those who think that, properly 
speaking, morality is no part of religion. For 
better or for worse, the two have been asso- 
ciated from the earliest times; but if nothing 
more remains to the agnostic, they would say, 
than " mere morality," albeit there is nothing 
else in the whole world so good as this, they do 
not think he can be justly said to have any 
thing which is really of the nature of religion. 
Does there, then, remain to the agnostic any 
thing but mere morality, any thing which has 
either the form or essence of religion over and 
above its moral elements? There certainly does, 
if those who accept Comte in his entirety have 
any right to answer. These, answering for 
themselves, insist that they have a religion 
which is just as truly a religion as the Roman- 
ist's or Calvinist's. It* has no God; it has no 
immortality; though it has a kind of prayer. 



34 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



But it has a substitute for God, namely, Le 
Grand Etre> the Great Being, Humanity, past, 
present, and future. It has a substitute for 
immortality, — the perpetuity of social influ- 
ence ; and that it is no ignoble one let George 
Eliot's poem testify, the grandest poem of these 
latter days : — 

" Oh, may I join the choir invisible ! " 

It has a substitute for prayer, — ascriptions of 
reverence and adoration to the spirits of great 
men and saintly women who have been incorpo- 
rated into the Great Being. And yet, although 
the religion of humanity, as this is called, is 
capable of very grand expression, and though it 
corresponds to a circle of ideas which is full 
of goodly inspiration, is it not, after all, a sort 
of make-believe religion? Its god, its immor- 
tality, its prayer, are substitutes for the God and 
immortality and prayer of bond fide religion, and 
excellent as substitutes; and if my question 
were, What substitutes are there for God and 
immortality with the agnostic who has com- 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 35 

pletely lost his faith in these? I might assign to 
them a very honorable place. 

Setting aside, then, the so-called religion of 
humanity, does there remain to the agnostic 
any thing of the essence of religion after he 
feels himself compelled to say, " If there is any 
God, I cannot find him ; if there is any immor- 
tality, I cannot prove it : and that God interferes 
to answer any human prayer I cannot find a 
particle of warrant." I do not think that I am 
anxious to make out a case in the affirmative, 
but only to find out the truth ; but I will not 
deny that I am very happy when the truth 
appears to be that the most vital essence of 
religion may remain to one who finds himself 
compelled to make the above disclaimers. For 
the most vital essence of religion is not involved 
in any theory of God or of the world, nor in any 
theory of human destiny, nor in any form of 
prayer which needs an interfering deity. The 
most vital essence of religion is not involved in 
any of these distinctions of personal and im- 
personal. Least of all are those to be ac- 



36 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



counted atheists who cannot speak of God as 
personal. Spinoza could not so speak of him, 
and yet Novalis rightly said of him, " He was 
a God-intoxicated man," and Schleiermacher, 
" Spinoza not believe in God ! My friends, he 
did not believe in any thing else. ,, Mind you 
that here I am not pleading for myself; for, if 
I cared to be dogmatic about the mysteries of 
the Godhead, I should say, To predicate per- 
sonality of the Infinite is to express the in- 
expressible a little better than to predicate 
impersonality. But may we not go one step 
further, and declare that the most vital essence 
of religion is not involved in any theory of 
God whatever, or even in any affirmation of a 
being who is the moving force of all phenom- 
ena? To affirm God is to affirm a theory of the 
universe; to me a theory of all-sufficing ex- 
cellence and absolutely indispensable. I can 
conceive that all the harmonious order of the 
universe was potential in that vaporous cloud 
which was the primordial substance of the 
world, but only if there was potential in it an- 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 



37 



decedent to the lowest term of the ascending 
series, a higher than the highest. Evolution of 
a higher from a lower is comprehensible enough. 
But evolution of a higher by a lower is abso- 
lutely incomprehensible. To affirm God, then, 
is to affirm a theory of the universe ; most in- 
dispensable, but still a theory. And the most 
vital essence of religion is not involved in 
man's relation to any theory of the universe, 
but in his relation to the universe itself. It is 
to be impressed with its majestic order, to thrill 
with recognition of the tender grace and awful 
sweep of things, and to convert this passive 
recognition into a voluntary energy of devotion 
to the eternal order in which we find ourselves 
embosomed. And even for the complete agnos- 
tic there may remain this vital essence of re- 
ligion. He may discard all theories, but he 
cannot discard the universe. Evermore his 
little life is set in the midst of this abounding 
order, mystery, and law. And the question, Is 
he a religious man? is answered, not by discov- 
ering what theory he has of God or of the uni- 



33 



THE FAITH OF REASON, 



verse, but by discovering in what attitude he 
stands before the everlasting fact. If in an 
attitude of easy indifference or unawed gar- 
rulity, then truly he is not a religious man. 
But if the morning and the evening hush, the 
glow at night of multitudinous stars, the 
"spring's delicious trouble in the ground," 
the summer's beautiful effulgence, the im- 
perial splendor of autumnal days, and, more 
than all, the mystery of human life and thought 
and love, — if all these things gladden his 
heart so much that he cannot express his joy, 
and yet soften it so that suddenly it overflows 
with unforbidden tears, then he may well be 
more religious than one who has a theory of 
God or of the universe which he can rattle off 
to you as glibly as a boy his morning lesson. 
And though such a man may never pray in any 
form of words, and least of all may ever wish to 
coax the Infinite to interfere to turn his mill or 
sell his merchandise, or even to make him a 
better man, which he can do at any time him- 
self by simply availing himself of the normal 



AGNOSTIC RELIGION. 



39 



structure of the universe, — nevertheless when 
this man looks up to heaven at night, or out 
upon the sea, or into faces that respond to him 
with eye-beams full of love, or into the im- 
measurable deeps of his own moral nature, the 
awe that falls upon his heart, the joy with which 
it leaps, the peace that passes understanding 
and subdues him utterly, is just as truly prayer 
as any form of words that ever trembled with 
the fervor of a saint's most passionate entreaty. 

You may think, perhaps, that I have been a 
long way round, and taken a great deal of 
trouble to show that men and women who de- 
clare that they have no religion may neverthe- 
less have a religion of the most genuine sort. 
You may think they will not thank me for my 
trouble. Well, what I have written has not 
been written with a view to getting their thanks. 
It has been written to express my gratitude and 
joy that religion, equally with morality, is so 
independent of all special theories, so deeply 
implicated in the total make of things, that 
where there is intelligence and earnestness there 



40 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

must be religion. Hundreds are busy in our time 
in trying to convince their neighbors that unless 
they believe thus and so they are religious or 
moral under false pretences; that unless they 
believe thus and so they have no right to be 
moral or religious. But mine has been a far 
more gracious task: to show that morals have 
their basis in no theological conceptions, but in 
the natural relationships of human life ; to show 
that even religion in its divinest essence is not 
man's sense of his relation to any theory of the 
universe, however pure and high, but is rather 
his sense, tender and awful, sweet and strong 
and sane, of his relation to the universe itself. 
I do not know what better New- Year's greeting 
I could give you than this assurance, that wher- 
ever there is intelligence and earnestness, there 
religion is as inevitable as to a living man the 
beating of his heart. Religion may be vastly 
more than this inevitable relation between the 
finite and the infinite, but this must ever be the 
brightest jewel in its crown. 

January 5, 1879. 



II. 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 

AST Sunday morning, it was my happy 



privilege to invite you, each and all, to 
come and rejoice with me that religion is so 
deeply implicated in the make of things, the 
structure of mankind, that where there is ear- 
nestness. and intelligence there must be religion. 
The most of you accepted my invitation joyfully. 
From time to time, you had been troubled by 
your apparent obligation to deny the possession 
of religion to certain of your friends and neigh- 
bors, whose apparent irreligiousness, or, rather, 
unreligion, seemed to suggest a doubt whether 
religion after all is of any great importance. If 
some of the best men you know have no religion, 
religion cannot, it would seem, be quite that in- 
dispensable thing which we have heretofore 
imagined it to be. All those among you who 
have had some such experience as this were very 




42 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



glad, I think, that, without any forcing of the 
facts, I could so easily make it appear that the 
essential virtue of religion is not involved in any 
theory or definition, but in man's attitude of 
reverence and loyalty before this Everlasting 
Fact we call the Universe. Others among you 
were, perhaps, somewhat differently affected. 
Certain religious beliefs are to you so important, 
that you have come to regard them as absolutely 
essential to religion ; to feel that a man is re- 
ligious under false pretences, that a man has no 
right to be religious, who does not very con- 
sciously and definitely believe in God and Im- 
mortality and Prayer. And some of you were so 
unfortunate as to identify my own position with 
that of the persons I was speaking of, though I 
took particular pains to avoid any such misunder- 
standing. I sometimes think that preachers are 
the victims of a horrible fatality, in virtue of which 
their hearers are seized with a sudden anxiety 
about the temperature of the church, or whether 
somebody else will not object to what the 
preacher is saying, just at the moment when he 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 43 

is saying something which he is particularly 
anxious they should hear. And so it happens, 
when he has dipped his pen in the ink thirty or 
forty times without writing a word, debating with 
himself whether he shall call a thing invisible 
blue or invisible green, they go away with the 
idea that he said it was as black as a coal, or 
holding him responsible for an opinion which he 
has stated only with a view to expressing his 
partial or entire dissent. 

The leading thought of my discourse 1 last 
Sunday morning was one which has long been 
exceedingly precious and consoling to my mind, 
but it was not one in which I have any special 
and exclusive property. It has been carefully 
elaborated and eloquently enforced by J. Allan- 
son Picton, an English Trinitarian clergyman, 
whose book, " The Mystery of Matter," is the 
most helpful and instructive volume I have read 
for the last dozen years. But it was not original 
with him. " The Nation," of some recent date, 
speaking of the poet Shelley, says that he " re- 

1 On " Agnostic Religion," p. 13. 



44 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



jected all that is properly known as Christianity, 
and that it is impossible to deny his athei'sm ; " 
and yet, " in all that constituted a religious 
mind, in natural piety, in purity of life and 
motive, Shelley was exceptionally conspicuous." 
But of this seeming paradox " The Nation " 
finds abundant confirmation in the statement of 
the late Frederick Robertson, that " with all his 
scepticism, Shelley's disposition was any thing 
but irreligious." " A person of much eminence 
for piety in our times," says Robertson, " has 
well observed that the greatest want of religious 
feeling is not to be found among the greatest in- 
fidels, but among those who never think of 
religion except as a matter of course." " The 
leading feature of Shelley's character," he con- 
tinues, " may be said to have been a natural 
piety." It is not uncommon for Christian people 
to allow that such or such a person, however 
sceptical, is " a good man ; " but you will notice 
that what Robertson claims for Shelley, who was 
no mere agnostic, but a dogmatic atheist, if there 
ever was one, is " a natural piety," — a sentiment 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 45 

which preachers who have not a thousandth 
part of Robertson's spirituality, are apt to think 
impossible save in connection with a very defi- 
nite idea of God, and a very frank and posi- 
tive belief in him. You will see, then, that for 
the doctrine of my discourse I did not lack the 
enthusiastic support of two at least (Picton 
and Robertson) of the most gifted evangelical 
Christians of these modern times. Without their 
support, I should feel equally certain, not only 
of the truth, but of the joy and satisfaction in- 
herent in my view; but if any of you sigh to 
have the truth I hold indorsed by orthodox 
authorities, you are entirely welcome to the facts 
as I have stated them. 

After so much of a prelude to my discourse, 
let me proceed at once to the discussion of the 
question, What is religion? — a question which 
I wish to answer in a general way before taking 
up some of the leading doctrines of religion, and 
making them the subjects of a series of dis- 
courses. My purpose is not now, as last Sunday 
morning, to discover the mpst vital essence of 



4 6 



THE FAITH OF REASON, 



religion, but to discover, first, its relative sig- 
nificance, then the course of its development, and, 
finally, the highest form it can assume consist- 
ently with the idea which I have already set 
forth of its most vital essence. 

What is religion? It is the most significant 
factor in the history of mankind. I know that 
there are those who think, or think they think, 
that religion is a matter of the past ; that it has 
seen its best days, and is now seeing its w T orst, — 
the days of its humiliation and decay; unless 
they should prefer to call the days of its power 
and triumph' its worst days, — worst for mankind, 
— and these its best, because well-nigh its last. 
But even they would not be able to deny that 
in the past the religious life has been the most 
conspicuous and important interest. Religion 
has been the most engrossing theme of the his- 
torian ; it has built the grandest buildings, writ- 
ten the most precious books, painted the most 
beautiful pictures, suggested the most glorious 
music, inspired the most illustrious men, in- 
augurated the most important changes of society, 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 47 

controlled the most far-reaching movements of 
mankind. Religion was the fountain-head of all 
the ancient arts. Literature was invented to im- 
mortalize her ethics and her prayers; astron- 
omy, to ferret out the secrets of her starry gods ; 
sculpture, to make visible her deities ; architec- 
ture, to enshrine the sculptor's work; mathe- 
matics, to mark out her festivals, the song and 
dance to gladden them. It is a notable fact that 
even those who are at present most convinced 
that religion has had its day, do not find any 
other problems so fascinating and engrossing as 
those furnished by her vicissitudes. Dead she 
may be, yet they are never tired of groping in 
her tomb, of studying out the footprints she has 
made across the centuries. Even her childhood, 
feeble and stammering, as all childhood is, 
has kept hundreds of scholars busy day and 
night during the present century, until at length, 
in his " Principles of Sociology," the indefatiga- 
ble and faithful Spencer has been able to gather 
up into a graphic and consistent whole the story 
of her birth and infant ways, — so charming 



48 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

some of them in their absurdity, — in a way that 
leaves almost nothing for his successors to do but 
to add comment and illustration to his compre- 
hensive and convincing argument. In all of this, 
I am aware there is no argument for the continu- 
ance of any special form of religion. But there 
is an argument for the belief that there must be 
something essential to humanity in that which has 
been so vast, so multiform, so universal, so far- 
dating in its manifestations. Modern opponents 
of religion are, for the most part, great believers 
in the power and dignity of human nature. But 
could human nature be convicted of hopeless 
idiocy in any other way more forcibly than by the 
assurance that all its interest in religion, from 
first to last, has been a grand mistake? Banish 
the religions, each and all, but only that religion 
may the more remain ! That which has been so 
long in coming to maturity will never perish in 
a night. The mushroom may do that, but not 
the oak, whose roots have sucked its life-blood 
from the soil, whose strength has matched itself 
against a century of storms. 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 49 

At the same time, it would be almost criminal 
for us to overlook the fact that such a vast 
amount of evil has been associated with religion 
in the past, that it is no wonder that many have 
sincerely doubted whether the good associated 
with it has been of equal weight. 

" We cannot forget," says Dr. Hedge, " that 
" religion has been a worker of evil, — one of the 
" greatest of the workers of evil. No agent that 
" has wrought in earthly scenes has been more pro- 
" lific of ruin and wrong. The wildest aberrations 
" of human nature, crimes the most portentous, 
" the most desolating wars, persecutions, hatred 
" and wrath and bloodshed, more than have 
" flowed from all sources beside, — have been its 
" fruits. The victims of fanaticism outnumber 
" those of every other and all other passions that 
" have wasted the earth. Pining in dungeons, 
" hunted like beasts of prey, stretched on the 
" rack, affixed to the cross, — their sufferings are 
" the horror of history. No high-wrought fiction, 
" recounting imaginary woes, can match the 
" colors of their authentic tragedy. A corrup- 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



" tion of the text of the Vedas has cast thousands 
" of Hindu widows alive on the funeral-pile. An 
" interpolation of two words in the service of the 
" Eastern Church has driven whole villages in 
" Russia into fiery death. A sentence in the 
" Book of Exodus has been a death-sentence to 
" millions of hapless women. And who shall 
" compute the sum of the lives that have fur- 
" nished the holocausts of the Inquisition? 

* Tantum religio potuit suadere malarum.' 

" In this tale of sorrows we must reckon, more- 
" over, the melancholy and madness religion so 
" often engenders, — religious mania, — which, 
" where it does not impel to self-slaughter, op- 
" presses the soul with dull despair, or pierces 
" it with mortal anguish. It is fearful to think 
" that man, in addition to the necessary bur- 
" dens of life and all inevitable ills, should 
" be subject to these ideal woes; that so many 
" fine spirits should suffer blight through their 
" own diseased imaginations ; that to so many 
" noble minds the light that is in them should be 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 5 I 

" made darkness through superstitious doubts 
" and fears ; that so many inncrcent hearts should 
" bear the burden of self-imputed guilt and 
" doom ! No region of the earth, and no plane 
" of life, is secure from this plague. Bayard 
" Taylor found in the track of the missionaries 
" beyond the Arctic circle the same spiritual ails 
" that have desolated polished lands. ' The 
" soul/ says Novalis, ' is the most active of 
" poisons.' Religion is the soul of mortal life ; 
" when mis-directed or over-urged it becomes, in- 
" stead of an animating force, a consuming fire." 

This is, indeed, a serious indictment of reli- 
gion, but, coming as it does from one of its most 
thoughtful advocates, it cannot be suspected 
of over-statement. But there has been a great 
waste of abuse of religion on account of this 
dark side of its development, which hundreds of 
would-be evolutionists still keep up, though in 
strict accordance with the terms of their phi- 
losophy, they have no right to do so. All such 
abuse presupposes the supernatural standpoint. 
Your ardent evolutionist, in nine cases out of 



52 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



ten, speaks of religion as if it had been made 
complete outside of human nature, and imposed 
upon it, when, in fact, human nature itself has 
made it, and it has been good or bad just in pro- 
portion as human nature has been the one or 
the other. " Imposed by priests ?" Ay, but 
the priests are self-imposed, legitimate children 
of humanity. Religion has kept pace with hu- 
man culture. At every stage, it has been the 
best religion possible. Nothing, seen from our 
standpoint, can be more puerile than the ear- 
liest ideas of religion ; but, with the data which 
men had at their command, they were the most 
reasonable possible, and did as much credit to 
their inventors as the ideas of Martineau and 
Tyndall and Spencer do to them. It is high 
time for men to stop blaming religion for her 
debasing treatment of humanity, seeing that she 
is humanity's own child, and ever bears her 
parent's image in her face. 

What is religion? It is an order of ideas and 
beliefs and practices which includes, upon the 
one hand, the humblest worship of ancestral 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 53 

ghosts, — a stage antecedent to fetichism, — and 
on the other hand, the silence of a Carlyle or 
Spencer before the Infinities and Immensities, 
and all that lies between this zenith and that 
nadir. And. nowhere, along the course of this 
development, is there a break at which a super- 
natural element can be intruded, while the wild 
growth of supernatural theories can easily be ac- 
counted for without recourse to any supernatural 
facts. Religion is often spoken of as if it were 
coextensive with humanity. But investigation 
seems to show that there are tribes still extant 
which have stopped short of religion in their de- 
velopment. Antecedent to religion there must 
be a regular development of ideas concerning 
sleep and dreams and swoon and epilepsy, of 
death and resurrection, of souls and ghosts, spirits, 
and demons. Religion does not properly begin 
before the supernatural agent has, as it were, 
forgotten his human origin, or at least ceased to 
be regarded as the special ancestor or friend. 
The realm of ghosts develops into a realm of 
supernatural agents, who have lost their ances- 



54 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



tral traits and special relationships, before religion 
can properly be said to have begun. Whether 
or not, then, " we are such stuff as dreams are 
made of," our religion is, most clearly, in the 
last analysis. It was the hush of consciousness 
in sleep that suggested to primeval men an 
inner-self who could go wandering off, leaving 
the body dull and silent, and come back to re- 
vive it. The analogy of sleep and death was 
too conspicuous to admit a moment's doubt that 
death was but a sleep, during which the other 
self might, must still be alive and stirring. It is 
hardly to be wondered at that ideas of a future 
life have engrossed so much -attention in the re- 
ligious sphere when we consider that the gen- 
esis of these ideas was actually antecedent to the 
genesis of religion. The ghosts were the pro- 
genitors of the gods. There was a doctrine of 
immortality before there was a doctrine of re- 
ligion. And it may well be, also, that the moral 
idea was other-worldly in its earliest form ; that 
the rights of ghostly ancestors took chronologi- 
cal as well as logical precedence of the rights of 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION 



35 



living men and women. Given the conviction 
of a world of ghosts, and every subsequent step 
in the development from ancestor-worship to 
fetichism, from fetichism to nature-worship, from 
nature-worship to polytheism, from polytheism 
to monotheism, from monotheism £s anthropo- 
morphic as possible, — that is, representing the 
god as much like a man as possible, — to mono- 
theism as little anthropomorphic as possible, — 
given the starting-point, and every subsequent 
stage of this process of evolution is inevitable. 
Strangely enough, — but in the strangeness is 
there not a hint that the evolution of religion has 
at length come full circle? — strangely enough, 
religion ends where it began, — with the affir- 
mation, God is a Spirit. But did ever formal 
likeness include such utterly divergent thought? 
The " spirit" of the primeval worshipper was an 
ancestral ghost. And there were as many gods 
as there were ghosts. For us there is One God. 
A spirit ? Say rather, dropping the article, who 
is spirit, one, and yet far more omnipresent than 
all the multitudes of the primeval worshipper. 



56 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

" A presence far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, — 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

There are those who seem to think religion 
wholly discredited, through all its course, by 
such an account of its genesis as this which I 
have given. It began in dreams, they say, and 
it is still a dream. The last spirit like the first 
is a film of the imagination. But no beginning, 
however small and weak, can utterly discredit 
the consummate fruit of any process of evolu- 
tion if it so be that the consummate fruit is fair 
and sweet. Because all apples are descended 
from the common crab, shall I despise my 
golden sweets upon yon " holy hill," and shall 
the Baldwins only blush for shame, and not, as 
maidens do, for greater loveliness? Is the 
great ocean steamer any less wonderful and 
beautiful because her first progenitor was not 
even a " dug-out/' but a charred log in which 
some savage made his first brief voyage? Does 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 57 

it detract any thing from Brunelleschi's dome, 
or Milan's miracle of countless spires, that the 
first essay in architecture was probably the 
tying together of the top-branches of several 
trees with some stout twig or vine? Are cer- 
tain special architectural forms any less beauti- 
ful, because in their inception they symbolized 
men's wonder at the mystery of reproduction? 
Could they have symbolized any thing more 
mysterious, any thing more wonderful? And 
does " the marriage of true minds " admit of 
any impediment or get any shadow of dis- 
honor on account of any thing that Lubbock 
and McLennan have written about wife-seizure 
as the universal form of primitive marriage? 
The evolutionist is a traitor to his own philoso- 
phy when, from the humble origin of any order 
of ideas, he infers their present worthlessness or 
any thing to their discredit. For it is essential 
to the theory of evolution to maintain that 
every order of ideas is suitable to the time of 
its appearance and to the grade of mind that 
gives it birth. But the genesis of religion was 



58 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

not unworthy or ignoble. Primitive religion 
was the expression of man's awe and wonder 
in the presence of his own mysterious life. Its 
genesis, therefore, was not material but spiritual. 
Thus, in its dawning hour, there was a hint of its 
noontide magnificence. 

So much for the relative importance of re- 
ligion, and so much for the order of its develop- 
ment. It now remains to ask, What is religion 
in this fourth quarter of the nineteenth century? 
Evidently it is no one thing, or if one thing, then 
e pluribus unum, one made up of many. It is 
an order of ideas and beliefs and practices 
almost or quite as comprehensive as the entire 
process of religious evolution from the remotest 
down to the present time. There is hardly any 
stage of religious evolution in the past which is 
not represented by the different religions of to- 
day which make up the sum of universal reli- 
gion. And, indeed, just as the present earth is 
the best book in which to study the geological 
history of the planet; just as its processes, at 
present going on, tell pretty much the whole 



THE NA TURE OF RELIGION. 59 



story, explain almost every thing that ever 
has taken place, — so the present phenomena 
of religion, the processes at present going on 
in the religious world, admit us into almost every 
secret of the ancient world of thought and as- 
piration. As a high mountain in the tropics 
reproduces every zone with its appropriate vege- 
tation, so present religion reproduces every zone 
of man's religious evolution with its appropri- 
ate ideas. Around the base, the savage growths 
of fetichism, and still lower forms, flourish with 
tropical luxuriance; higher up, the more tem- 
perate forms of polytheism and a monotheism 
still anthropomorphic; and, higher still, the 
Edelweiss's noble purity ; nay, but my figure fails 
me utterly; the mountain's top 'blossoms as 
never did the vales below, and heaven is more 
near, although its stars into more awful spaces 
seem withdrawn. 

The sympathy of religions ought to follow 
from the apprehension of their natural develop- 
ment, all from the same far-off and poor be- 
ginnings. No one can toss its head, elate with 



6o 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



the assurance of a supernatural origin, quite 
different from that of all the rest. No one, not 
even the highest, can look contemptuously on 
the lowest in the scale ; for in that lowest, as in 
a mirror, it can see the image of its own rude 
beginning. As the old gravestones used to 
phrase it : — 

" As you are now, so once was I." 

But from an order so inclusive, how select the 
only true religion? Included in this order is 
the lowest fetichism on the one hand, and on the 
other the most spiritual ideas. What if we say 
there is no absolute best ; the religion must be 
proportioned to the general character and cul- 
ture? The converted cannibal eats his super- 
fluous wife, because she is an obstacle to his 
Christian baptism. It is not as if we were all 
obliged to turn eclectics and go about search- 
ing for the best religion. What is best for one 
man is not best for another. Sitting Bull's own 
religion is probably better for him than James 
Martineau's would be. As for the higher thought, 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 6 1 

as Jesus said, " He that is able to receive it, let 
him receive it." Those that have it need not 
fear to publish it lest all these Romanists and 
Evangelical Protestants should suddenly accept 
it, and find it incompatible with their general 
character. They will not accept it. What they 
want is something concrete, tangible. Only with 
the general enlargement of their minds do men 
get rid of small ideas. Till then, the new beliefs 
are mere receptacles which hold the substance of 
the former creeds and dogmas. 

What is best for one man is not best for 
another. What is best for you and me is that 
which we now have, amended by the clearer 
vision of each succeeding day. Whatever joy 
arid blessing of the religious life may be in store 
for us, one thing is sure, our way to it must be 
along the path of our own personal conviction. 

" The hell from which a lie will keep a man," 
says George Macdonald, " is doubtless the best 
place that he can go to ; " and may we not add 
that the god for whose glory we must shun the 
guidance of the truth is, by this sign, a god 



62 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



whose glory ought to be with us a matter of 
supreme indifference ? 

What a great many persons seem to want is 
some excuse for keeping up the old names, no 
matter how little of the old meaning is kept 
along with them. Mr. Joseph Cook's theology 
is so different from Calvin's, that Calvin would 
have roasted him with less compunction than 
Servetus; but modern orthodoxy cannot suffi- 
ciently applaud him, because he gives it a lot 
of lame excuses for still keeping up a show of 
belief in the old doctrine, though perfectly aware 
that his trinity is not the old trinity, nor his 
atonement the old atonement, nor his depravity 
the old depravity, and so on through all the 
creeds and articles. And so, I grieve to say, there 
is some disposition here and there among radical 
thinkers, who honestly believe that religion is a 
thing of the past, to make-believe that this or that 
thing is religion which in reality they do not con- 
sider to be so. Here it is the worship of collec- 
tive humanity, and there the worship of the moral 
ideal. Again, knowing what prestige the name 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 63 

of religion carries, some endeavor to make out 
that morality is identical with religion, and co- 
extensive; while, on the other hand, there are 
not a few in the community who contend that 
religion is entirely independent of morality, and 
that, while morality is an ever-greatening reality, 
religion is a survival of the past. To neither of 
these positions can we commit ourselves after a 
careful study of the facts. To identify morality 
with religion, to declare that beyond morality 
religion has no significance, is to go counter to 
the entire history of religion since it has been 
historical, and to all the archaeologists have raked 
together beyond the utmost bound of history. 
The association of morality with religion has 
always been so close — or if not always, gener- 
ally — that to call morality an essential part of 
religion is certainly legitimate. Last Sunday 
morning I assumed for the moment the negation 
of this position in order to ask," If morality is 
not essential to religion, does any thing remain to 
the agnostic thinker that can properly be called 
religion ? " But the next moment, spite of my- 



6 4 



THE FAITH OF REASON, 



self, I brought it back again, when I said that 
the most vital essence of religion was to be im- 
pressed with the majestic order of the universe, 
to thrill with recognition of the tender grace and 
awful sweep of things, and (here the morality 
came back) to convert this passive recognition 
into a voluntary energy of devotion to the eternal 
order in which vje find ourselves embosomed. And 
if morality is a part of religion, it must be a 
great part ; if conduct be indeed, as Matthew Ar- 
nold has insisted, three-fourths of human life. 
He has not, I fancy, overrated its importance. 
But so long as morality responds to purely social 
inspirations, so long as duty is simply and only 
a man's contribution to the social order, a man's 
expression of his gratitude for the fidelity of 
former generations, it may be said that it is 
not consciously religious. It is unconsciously 
religious, because " the power, not ourselves, 
that makes for righteousness 99 is ultimately 
the power which doth 

" preserve the stars from wrong, 
And the most ancient heavens through it are fresh and strong.'' 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 65 

Morality becomes consciously religious only 
when it becomes a voluntary energy of devotion 
to the eternal order of the universe. Let a man's 
heart really quicken with those sentiments of 
awe and wonder, gratitude and trust — which are 
so deeply implicated, not only in the scientific 
apprehension of the universe, but, indeed, in any 
simply human or poetic vision of its infinite per- 
fections — and how can he help desiring, longing, 
steadfastly resolving to give himself in earnest 
service of that infinite power whose manifesta- 
tions have awakened in him all these sentiments? 
So piety becomes enthusiasm for humanity. 
The one life is in every thing. There is nothing 
without it. And all things are for every one. 
Just as the heavens globe themselves in every 
drop of dew, so does the universe in every indi- 
vidual life. All that has ever been was prepara- 
tion for this infinitesimal life of yours and mine. 
All the pasts help us ; all the futures beckon us. 
And now what is the natural, the inevitable re- 
sponse of any heart that feels all this : that all is 
so for each ; that one, the Infinite, is so for all. 



66 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



What can it be but Each for all ; each for the 
Infinite One? And this is morality with a 
divine emphasis. Such morality, so crowned 
and glorified, no one can doubt, is a true part of 
religion. 

Whatever substitutes for religion have been, 
or may yet be invented, that only has a perfect 
right to be considered a factor of religion which 
has been vitally associated with it from the ear- 
liest times. Evolution may exalt and purify the 
contents of religion, but the contents thus ex- 
alted and purified must not be dissipated into 
viewless air. And as morality has always been 
so vitally associated with religion that the scope 
of evolution must continue to embrace its sacred 
trusts, so has the idea of another life been so 
vitally associated with it that the scope of evolu- 
tion in the future cannot be exclusive of its ten- 
der radiance or solemn beauty. Certainly there 
have been great developments of religion of 
which the conviction of another life has been no 
part (Judaism, for example), or upon which the 
thought (as in the case of Buddhism), so far 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 67 

from being joyful and inspiring, lay like the 
weight of mountains. But special circumstances 
induced both of these exceptions to the rule, 
which is, that the idea of a future life has been 
included in the data of religion, as one of the 
most prominent, from the beginning of religion 
until now. The doctrine of immortality is older 
than the doctrine of the gods,- — was its progeni- 
tor, as we have seen. And so I cannot help 
thinking that the scope of religious evolution in 
the future must be inclusive of this idea. With 
the decay of proofs once thought to be sufficient, 
there may be less of confident assertion, less of 
unwavering faith ; but the idea need not be the 
less religious upon this account. A tender 
hope, deepening into serene assurance in great 
hours of thought, or in moments of unutterable 
love, — a perfect confidence that only that which 
is best for us as " members one of another " 
awaits us at the end ; so long as these remain, 
the line of evolution cannot be said to be broken, 
and these may well be more religious in their 
implications than the most absolute dogmatism 



68 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



that deals in pocket-maps and vital statistics of 
the New Jerusalem. 

However this may be, one thing is certain: 
this, that the future of religious evolution must 
include the element of worship, and the object 
of this worship must be no substitute for the 
Eternal, be it collective humanity or the moral 
ideal, but still the Eternal, the Infinite, " in whom 
we live and move and have our being." More 
silent than their fathers concerning him whom 
they call God, not speaking of him " as if he 
were a man on the next street," not parcelling 
out his attributes, not chattering about what he 
determined in the most secret counsels of the 
Trinity before the beginning of time, a tenderer 
awe, a holier reverence, shall be awakened by 
men's thought of him in coming times than ever 
in the past. 

It may be that some of you will think me in- 
consistent here with what I said last Sunday 
morning. Then I insisted that the most vital 
essence of religion is not involved in a man's 
theory of God or Immortality, but in the awe 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. 69 

which falls upon his mind as he confronts the 
universal order, and in the voluntary energy of 
self-surrender to this order which this awe inspires. 
If I had said or thought that the most vital es- 
sence of religion was merely some pleasant titil- 
lation consequent on seeing a glorious sunset or- 
a pretty face, then there would be some incon- 
sistency between what I said then and the em- 
phasis which I now place upon the sense of a 
relation to the Infinite Power. But what I had 
in mind, and what I endeavored to express, was 
that no mere satisfaction or delight in isolated 
objects is vitally religious, but the awe and glad- 
ness which are quickened in us when this or that 
isolated experience suddenly opens out into all 
the infinities and immensities and eternities. 
Though it were Buchner himself, the boldest of 
materialists, who thrilled with this emotion, in 
spite of his philosophy he would then and there 
commune with an infinite spirit ; his " tendency 
of matter to combine " would flash upon him as 
the Power, called by whatever name, adequate 
to produce the length and breadth and height 



70 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

and depth and beauty and sublimity and joy and 
love of this illimitable universe, and he would 
stand abashed and silent, if he did not like won- 
dering Linnaeus fall upon his knees. The most 
vital essence of religion does inhere in man's rela- 
tion to the universe, but, however unconsciously, 
this relation, when it is at its best, implies a re- 
lation to a power which manifests itself in the 
totality of universal life and law. It is no mere 
aggregation of phenomena that inspires our awe. 
No, but the blending of their various chords into 
that harmony which we affirm as often as we say 
the universe, — the turned-into-one. To have 
this vision and the attendant consecration is in- 
deed the most essential thing, but happiest of all 
are they who, consciously, can lift their hearts 
above all outward things to One who is the un- 
seen Power, whose flowing garment the time- 
spirit is for ever weaving, the inmost thought and 
life and love, for ever baffling our comprehension, 
whom still our very ignorance affirms, for whom 
no name is adequate ; whom, therefore, because 
we must still somehow speak of him, we call by 



THE NATURE OF RELIGION. J\ 

the most simple name of all, a name which is no 
definition, but a continent for all the awe and 
reverence and adoration with which our hearts 
expand, — a name which we have spoken thou- 
sands of times, but which, now that we pause 
and think of it we hardly dare to speak at all, — 
and yet will speak, I with my lips, you in your 
silent hearts, — now let us speak it, — God, 

January 12, 1879. 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



Him who dare name, 
And yet proclaim, 
Yes, I believe ? 
Who that can feel 
His heart can steel 
To say, I disbelieve ? 

Goethe. 



What were the God who sat outside to scan 
The spheres that 'neath his finger circling ran ? 
God dwells within, and moves the world and moulds, 
Himself and Nature in one form enfolds. 

Goethe. 

Mother of man's time-travelling generations, 
Breath of his nostrils, heart-blood of his heart, 

God above all gods worshipped of all nations, 
Light above light, law beyond law, Thou art. • 

Swinburne. 



III. 



CONCERNING GOD. 

^^ERTAINLY, it is not with any expectation 
of satisfying you or myself with what I 
have to say this morning concerning the highest 
of all themes that I venture to approach it, and 
invite your company. My treatment of this 
theme, as every man's, must be inadequate. The 
wisest here, however satisfactory they may be to 
others, will not be so to themselves. They will 
be less so in the future than they have been in 
the past. As knowledge widens with the lapse 
of time, less and less satisfactory will be men's 
speech concerning God. Language does not 
keep pace with thought and feeling. Two or 
three thousand, and even two or three hundred, 
years ago men had but little difficulty in finding 
words to express all they knew, or thought they 
knew, about God. Now it is different. The 
wisest lay a hushing finger on their lips. 



76 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

" Thought is deeper than all speech, 
Feeling deeper than all thought; 
Souls to souls can never teach 
What unto themselves is taught." 

Meantime the air is thick with talk of atheism, 
with doleful prophecies and dreadful warnings. 
With the spread of atheism we are assured there 
will be a fearful moral revolution. Men will seek 
evil and pursue it. They have done right so far, 
because they have felt God's eye to be upon 
them, or because they have expected to give an 
account of their actions in another world. Such 
is the doctrine ; and, if it is true to any great ex- 
tent, it would seem that there must follow some 
enfeeblement of the moral life. But it may be 
doubted whether the efficacy of the fear of hell 
as "a hangman's whip to hold the wretch in 
order," has not of late been overrated, and 
equally the dread of God's omniscience. It may 
also be doubted whether there is as much real 
atheism in the community as our terrorists 
insist. Men are silent or speak little, be- 
cause any thing they can say seems so inade- 
quate to express the sense of mystery which 



CONCERNING GOD, 77 

presses on their hearts. Many who are consid- 
ered atheists do not consider themselves so, 
although they may prefer being considered so to 
having their attitude confounded with that of the 
majority. What they object to is not so much 
belief as definition. When Joubert says, " It is 
not a difficult matter to believe in God, if we are 
not asked to define him," it is not that he would 
be at liberty to believe in him as little as pos- 
sible, but because he would be left free to ex- 
pand his thought and feeling without bound; 
because defined is confined. So, too, when Mat- 
thew Arnold says : " We, too, would say God if 
the moment we said God you would not pretend 
that you know all about him." The majority of 
atheists are men whose thought and feeling about 
God transcend all ordinary statements, all popu- 
lar definitions. Henry Thoreau said, " It would 
seem as if Atheism must be comparatively popu- 
lar with God." Why, but because the so-called 
atheists are often men who reverence God too 
much to waste much time with any of the theo- 
logians. It is not to be denied, however, that 
there are those who not only consider themselves 



78 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

atheists, but wish to be considered so by others, 
insisting that they have no right to claim immu- 
nity from any odium which properly attaches to 
this designation. But this, in many cases, is 
only a concession of the right of the majority 
to determine the significance of words. In 
others it is a sort of vanity. In perfect frank- 
ness, it must be allowed that there are those in 
every community who consider atheism some- 
thing smart. The satisfaction which such per- 
sons take in their atheism implies the God whom 
they deny. He must exist in order that they 
may have the distinction of saying to him, " Pon't 
flatter yourself : we do not believe in you." Their 
imagination affirms him in order that their vanity 
may have the satisfaction of denying him to his 
face. But among earnest, thoughtful men real 
atheism is so rare a bird, that few have ever seen 
its raven plumage or heard the utter melancholy 
of its cry. 

" Man cannot be God's outlaw if he would ; 
Nor so abscond him in the caves of sense 
But nature shall still search some crevice out 
With messages of splendor from that source 
Which soar he, dive he, baffles still and lures." 



CONCERNING GOD. 79 

Even the would-be materialist, of the most un- 
qualified stamp, who insists that there is but one 
substance in the world, and that this one sub- 
stance is matter, only succeeds in spelling the 
name of his deity with six letters instead of three : 
M-a-t-t-e-r, instead of G-o-d. For, as Tyndall 
long ago declared, " If life and thought are the 
very flower of matter, any definition of matter 
which omits life and thought must be inadequate 
if not untrue." " No man has seen God at any 
time," says the New Testament. And this is 
just as true of him if you spell his name with 
six letters as if you spell it with three. No man 
has seen Matter at any time. Emerson is hardly 
less God-intoxicated than Spinoza, and yet his 
saying, " The divinity is in the atoms," is only a 
more poetic and impressive form of Biichner's 
suicidal confession that matter as such has " a 
tendency to combine." 

The silence of some men concerning God 
seems to me vastly more reverent than the gar- 
rulity of others. Here a nameless thought, and 
there a multitude of words. Thoreau's idea, 



8o 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



about atheism being comparatively popular with 
God, was also Plutarch's, who expressed it with 
greater fulness. " I, for my own part," he said, 
" had much rather men should say that there is 
not, and never was, any such person as Plutarch, 
than that they should say Plutarch is an un- 
steady, fickle, froward, vindictive, and touchy 
fellow." And so he inferred that God would 
rather have men deny his existence, than speak 
of him as unsteady, fickle, and so on. But then 
Plutarch was a pagan, and had pagan deities in 
mind. Christians would not, perhaps, be open 
to such criticism. They never represent their 
God as unsteady, fickle, or vindictive. Certainly 
not ! But Plutarch's simile assumes that God is 
not the actual of the popular ideal. Were he 
the actual of Calvin's, I can fancy he would still 
appreciate the refusal of a man to believe him to 
be this, at its just value, even as a mortal man, 
although a conscious knave, would still appreci- 
ate a neighbor's misplaced confidence in his 
veracity and honor. Meantime, in my humble 
judgment, there is more of real reverence in 



CONCERNING GOD. 



81 



six lines of Goethe than in all the creeds of all 
the sects : — 

" Him who dare name 
And yet proclaim, 
Yes, I believe ? 
Who that can feel 
His heart can steel 
To say, I disbelieve ? " 

" Can man by searching find out God?" asks 
the Old Testament ; and the New Testament of 
modern science repeats the question with an 
accent of yet deeper sadness. But our case is 
not so pitiful as it would be if God did not find 
us out whether we search for him or no. The 
most that all our searching does is generally 
to find, not God, but some excuse or reason 
for the ineradicable faith in him which is im- 
planted in the most of us so deeply that I do 
not wonder that many have mistaken it for a 
primitive datum of consciousness. I doubt if 
any man ever consciously argued himself, or was 
argued into any real faith in God, — into aught 
more than some skin-deep belief in him. Faith 
in God is literally " the faith that is in us." How 
came it there? By supernatural revelation, says 



82 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



the supernaturalist. But revelation presupposes 
a revealer. Faith in a revelation presupposes 
faith in God. For the message to be sent, there 
must be a sender. For the message to be com- 
pletely trusted, it must be impossible for God to 
lie. Moreover, with the advance of knowledge 
it becomes more and more unlikely that there has 
ever been any such thing as supernatural reve- 
lation. The genesis of the belief, common to all 
religions, is easily accounted for without the inter- 
vention of a single supernatural fact. The argu- 
ment of Hume : " It is more likely that evidence 
should be false than that a miracle should be 
true," has never yet been proved fallacious, and 
grows in strength as men more clearly recognize 
that evidence, in order to be false, need not be 
consciously so. To evade the force of this argu- 
ment by admitting that the miracle is natural, is 
to discharge the miracle of all authoritative sig- 
nificance. It must be supernatural in order to 
be invested with a divine authority. But if " the 
faith which is in us " — in the most of us, surely 
— did not come by revelation, how does it 



CONCERNING GOD. 83 

come? Theodore Parker used to say by con- 
sciousness. But the philosophers assure us that 
we can be conscious only of the affections of our 
mind. We cannot be conscious of that by which 
they are affected. Consciousness of God is 
then impossible. Again, it is affirmed, that " the 
faith which is in us " is an intuition. But what 
is an intuition? A necessary truth, answers the 
transcendentalist, — a necessary truth perceived 
by the reason without any assistance from the 
understanding. But intuitions of this sort do 
not enjoy the high repute to-day which they did 
formerly. It begins to be doubted whether there 
are any such intuitions ; whether the mind can 
be split up into reason and understanding, or, at 
least, whether — to parody a saying of Herbert 
Spencer's — " expression is feature in the mak- 
ing " — the understanding is not reason in the 
making. The philosophy of experience inclines 
to the opinion that even " necessary truths " are 
discovered to be such by observation and experi- 
ment and reflection, that they do not inhere in 
mind as such. This philosophy also talks of 



84 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

intuitions, but its intuitions are not like those of 
the transcendentalist, — a kind of super-rational 
revelation privately communicated to each indi- 
vidual soul. They are the products of ances- 
tral and race-experience organized in us. Our 
faith in God; then, is an intuition, — the flower 
of an hereditary experience, whose roots are 
buried in an immemorial past. Thanks for its 
beauty and its fragrance, as it opens in the 
hushed seclusions of our hearts ! But evidently 
an intuition of this sort, a product of experience, 
can have no such authority as would the intu- 
ition of the transcendentalist if this were all 
which it was formerly conceived to be. Some, 
indeed, may be so constituted that they can 
enjoy the great inheritance on which they enter 
here, without ever thinking or wondering how it 
came to them, and whether it is lawfully theirs. 
The majority are, in fact, so constituted. But 
there are not a few who, once they know that the 
faith which is in them is no supernatural gift, no 
organic necessity, but an inheritance from the 
past, must set about to find the title-deeds, must 



CONCERNING GOD. 85 

know, if possible, how the estate was earned ; 
what work was done, what battles fought, before 
it was entailed to them. This is the meaning of 
k world of patient study in these latter days into 
the origin and development of men's religious 
ideas. Tylor, and Spencer, and Coulange, and 
Lubbock, and the rest, what are they but patient 
searchers of our title-deeds, in order that we 
may know whether our right is indefeasible in 
this estate of faith in God which has come down to 
us from immemorial times ? Honor to those who, 
finding themselves unable to make out their title 
to their own satisfaction, vacate the premises ; 
albeit for them to do so is to go forth like Abra- 
ham, not knowing whither ! For such also, believe 
me, there is " a city that hath foundations. " But 
happy they who dare believe that their inherit- 
ance, however dubious the title of their remotest 
ancestors, has in the course of centuries been 
fairly earned ; and that, when superstition's every 
lien upon it has been discharged, it will still be 
ample for the free soul to revel and rejoice in, 
without fear of any interdict of science or any 



86 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



challenge that the lords of reason can oppose 
to her possession ! 

It cannot be denied that an element of un- 
reality enters very largely into the primitive idea 
of God, if the genesis of this idea has been cor- 
rectly made out by the most learned anthro- 
pologists and sociologists. There are those who 
think that when the genesis of this idea has been 
shown to be involved in misconceptions almost 
innumerable, the idea has itself been relegated 
to the sphere of childish superstition. If the 
phenomena of sleep and trance first suggested to 
mankind the idea of " an inner man " — a soul ; 
if the analogy of sleep and death suggested that 
the soul was still alive when its " last sleep " had 
settled on the body; if the ancestral ghosts thus 
arrived at, from being at first regarded as mere 
human ghosts to be invoked, placated, and so 
on, came at length to be regarded as gods, the 
ghost-food passing over into sacrifice, the invo- 
cations into prayers; if, further on, stones and 
trees, then clouds, and heat and cold, and wind, 
and sun and moon and stars, — all came to be 



CONCERNING GOD. 



87 



regarded as the seats of ghostly power ; if this is 
a correct interpretation of the phenomena of 
primitive religion, does not the idea of God en- 
gendered in this ghostly atmosphere become 
itself as "thin as a ghost "? How from the 
midst of so much unreality could ever come by 
any legitimate process the idea of that Supreme 
Reality which we of modern times mean to sug- 
gest as often as we speak of God? 

My answer is that, if the beginning of the God- 
idea was such as I have tried to indicate, — and 
I believe that it was so, — we ought not to con- 
found the essence of the feeling out of which it 
came with their rational psychology with which it 
was associated. The essence of the feeling was 
a sense of the mysteriousness of human life. 
That which oppressed the primitive man with 
awe and wonder was essentially the same fact 
before which our latest science stands abashed, 
— the connection between mind and body. It 
was the mystery attaching to the thought of 
ghostly ancestors, peopling the forest-haunts with 
shadowy denizens, that made it possible for the 



88 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



sentiment of worship to go out to them from the 
poor savage heart; and, however trivial the psy- 
chology, the mystery was real enough ; so that to 
say that the first step in the evolution of the 
God-idea was unreal is to mistake its formal ac- 
cident for its essential character. And so, fur- 
ther along, grant that the indwelling life ascribed 
to tree or stone, which constituted these objects 
fetiches, or to sun and moon and stars in 
the next stage, which we call nature-worship ; 
grant that this indwelling life was made up, to the 
imagination of the savage, of one or more of the 
great company of ghosts which, by this time had 
quite forgotten, as it were, their human relations, 
— the fact remains that, antecedent to this theory 
of ghostly life, there must have been the sense 
of life to be accounted for. What the savage 
did was to account for it by the only life with 
which he felt himself to be acquainted. His 
intentions were excellent. He thought he was 
proceeding from the known to the unknown. In 
the strictest sense, it may be said that the God- 
idea was not fairly born until the world of ghosts 



CONCERNING GOD. 



8 9 



had gradually become a vast mysterious realm 
of life, an incalculable store of energy on which 
the savage mind could draw in order to account 
for any natural phenomenon that appealed to it 
for a solution of the mystery of its seeming life. 
The key of his position, meanwhile, was his sense 
of seeming life to be accounted for. The god he 
really worshipped was this seeming life. His 
ghostly explanation was, no doubt, entirely in- 
sufficient. But it was not his explanation that 
he worshipped. It was the seeming life which 
he endeavored to explain. 

The next step beyond nature-worship in the 
development of the God-idea was polytheism; 
the worship of many gods, not in objective forms 
as in fetichism and nature-worship, but as imagi- 
nary beings, whose genesis is to be accounted 
for in various ways. As the phenomena of nat- 
ure and society were rudely classified, a single 
spirit was imagined as the controlling deity of 
each separate class. The choice of this deity was 
variously determined. " To him that hath shall be 
given," was a controlling principle. As the big 



90 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



fish eat up the little ones, so the big gods de- 
voured their smaller rivals. The favorite gods 
of nature-worship became the gods of poly- 
theism, to the exclusion of their less significant 
companions. Another source of income to the 
polytheistic pantheon was the apotheosis of dis- 
tinguished chiefs, warriors, medicine-men, and 
so on, for whom the attributes of the nature- 
myths had a remarkable affinity. But in this 
polytheistic stage of the God-idea the noticeable 
thing is this, that what was really worshipped 
was the hidden life which was the background 
of phenomenal existence. The gods of poly- 
theism were but so many explanations of this 
life, then the most reasonable that could be had. 
But the real object of worship was the hidden 
life; the Power that made the trees wave and 
the waters flow, the sun and moon and stars to 
shine, the earth to rise out of her wintry grave 
clad in the spring-time beauty. The only unre- 
ality was in the explanation. The mystery which 
polytheism endeavored to explain was a bond 
fide mystery. It might well make men's hearts 



CONCERNING GOD. gi 

tremble with fear, or swell with rapture, or dilate 
with joy. 

From polytheism, the worship of many gods, 
to monotheism, the worship of one, was the next 
step in the development of the God-idea. Here 
also the principle, " To him that hath shall be 
given," had, no doubt, great influence. The 
favorite god tended to be the only one, little by 
little crowding the others from their thrones. 
Different tribes had different favorites, and the 
strongest tribe demanded exclusive worship for 
its deity, and was able to enforce the claim. 
Natural selection operated here as in the physi- 
cal world. There was a struggle for existence, 
and a preservation of the fittest; the fittest 
here not meaning the best, but, as often in the 
physical world, only the strongest, the ablest to 
survive. Midway between polytheism and mon- 
otheism we have monolatry, the exclusive wor- 
ship of one deity without denying the existence 
of others. But gods not worshipped cease to 
be regarded as realities. The god exclusively 
worshipped tends to be the only god to whom 



92 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



existence is allowed. And hence a monotheistic 
God-idea. 

At this stage of development, as at every earlier, 
it must be admitted that there are elements of 
unreality involved in every step of the advance. 
But here again, as at every previous stage, the 
unreality was in the explanation, not in the thing 
explained. The real object of worship here, as 
before, was the mystery of life behind phe- 
nomena. The dawning sense of unity in these, 
the beginning of all science and philosophy, sug- 
gested the unity of the underlying mystery. I 
grant you that the monotheistic god was at first 
dreadfully anthropomorphic : " a non-natural 
man," "a man of war;" to the Semite a Be- 
douin sheik at first, and then a king, — the 
earthly monarchy always tending to produce a 
heavenly counterpart in human thought. But, 
again, the noticeable thing is that the real object 
of awe and wonder and worship was not the 
man-like deity, — that he was not reverenced and 
worshipped for his man-likeness, but as the 
mysterious Power adequate to produce the world 



CONCERNING GOD. 93 

of nature and humanity. The man-likeness was 
a necessity of childish thought, of undevelop- 
ment, of survival in culture; but it could not 
successfully impeach the reality of the Mysterious 
Power of which it was the concrete symbol, nor 
the reality of the worship honestly accorded to 
this Power. 

With the development of monotheism, the 
God-idea reaches its highest point of evolution, 
except as this idea once generated is capable of 
indefinite purification. And the most notable 
feature in this process is the transference of man's 
awe and wonder from the exceptional in his ex- 
perience to the regular and orderly. From the 
lowest fetich-worshipper up to the average Chris- 
tian monotheist of this nineteenth century, the 
most potent suggestions of deity have come 
from the apparently exceptional and abnor- 
mal. The disposition of the untutored savage 
to choose for his fetich the most grotesque ob- 
ject — tree or stone — that he can find, is abso- 
lutely identical with the disposition of the 
cultured modern Christian to seek for God in 



94 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



some miraculous interposition rather than in the 
invariable order of the world, " staring with won- 
der to see water turned into wine, and heedless 
of the stupendous fact of his own personality." 
So pertinacious has been the resolution of the 
religious world to find God only in the appar- 
ently abnormal and inconsequent, that, by force 
of association, it came at length to be regarded 
as an axiom that, if God is not a sort of " prince 
of misrule," then he is nothing. Parallel with the 
development of religion for hundreds of years, 
there has been a development of science. But 
the tendency of science has been to everywhere 
dissipate the wonder inhering in the apparently 
abnormal and inconsequent by including them 
in its generalizations of law and order. Sure 
of his axiom, " The more law the less God;" 
the religionist has contemplated this process 
with unqualified dismay. Province after prov- 
ince has been wrested from the domain of per- 
sonal agency and annexed to the domain of law, 
till it has seemed only a question of time whether 
every vestige of the Deity would not finally be 



CONCERNING GOD. 95 

expelled from the universe. But while, little by* 
little, the old sense of mystery, inhering in the 
apparently exceptional and abnormal, has been 
going out, a new sense of mystery, slowly but 
surely has been coming in, — a sense of mystery 
inhering in the uniformities of natural phenom- 
ena. The more law, the more God — the more 
mystery, wonder, awe, and trust — has been 
the growing conviction which has kept pace with 
this development. " As fast as science transfers 
more and more things from the category of 
irregularities to the category of regularities, the 
mystery that once attached to the superstitious 
explanation of them becomes a mystery attach- 
ing to the scientific explanation of them ; there 
is a merging of many special mysteries in one 
general mystery." 1 " So that," says Herbert 
Spencer, " beginning with the germinal idea of 
mystery which the savage gets from a display 
of [anomalous] power, . . . and the germinal 
sentiment of awe accompanying it, the progress 
is towards an ultimate recognition of a mystery 
1 Spencer's Study of Sociology, p. 310. 



9 5 



THE FAITH OF REASON, 



behind every act and appearance, and a transfer 
of the awe from something special and oc- 
casional to something universal and unceasing ; " 
which something is the infinite God of scientific 
faith. 

If now I have accomplished my purpose, I 
have made it plain that no unreality attaching 
to the earliest development of religion, or to 
any subsequent stage, has prejudiced the value 
of the God-idea in its present form or indeed in 
any form it has assumed from the beginning 
of its long and painful march from puerile 
animism up to the glorious consciousness of 
One who, 

" be he what he may, 
Is yet the fountain light of all our day, 
Is yet the master-light of all our seeing." 

This has been proved by showing that, at every 
stage, a bona fide mystery has been involved in 
the idea ; and that the real object of awe and rev- 
erence and worship has been this mystery, and not 
the explanation of it, varying with every stage 
of culture. 



ide; 



CONCERNING GOD. 97 

How then? Do I erect an altar " to the un- 
known God," and bid you come and worship? 
I answer Yes and No. " Unknown and yet 
well known " is a Pauline phrase with which we 
may complement the inscription which the 
apostle found on the Athenian altar. Unknoivn 
and yet well known ! A friend suggests to me, 
" The Sum of the Unknown " as the best possi- 
ble definition of God, a definition which neither 
defines nor confines. Such a definition would 
indefinitely postpone the advent of atheism ; for, 
though " the sum of the unknown " is being 
steadily abridged by the discoveries of science, 
there is no immediate danger of its being wholly 
conquered and annexed to the domain of knowl- 
edge. And then, too, while " the sum of the 
unknown" is always growing smaller, it is 
always growing larger to our apprehension. 
The more we know, the better do we realize 
what realms of mystery, still unexplored, chal- 
lenge our patience and our courage. But, 
remote as is the possibility, I do not relish the 
idea that, if we could know every thing, we could 



9 8 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



write God's epitaph ; that the increase of knowl- 
edge is a gradual elimination of the unknown 
quantity, God, from the equation of our thought 
and feeling. Moreover, the unknown which has 
elicited the awe and reverence of men's hearts 
has never been a simple negative. It has been 
wonderful to them and awful and reverend 
as the mysterious background of something 
known or felt to be so. And, with the advance 
of science, w T hat makes the ever vaster ampli- 
tude of the unknown so quickening to our awe, 
our gladness, and our trust, is that the little we 
do know is so wonderful, so marvellous ; and we 
proceed to people all the vast unknown with 
the benignant forms and forces which have 
been openly revealed to us. It is as when I 
stand upon the rocky headlands of my native 
, shore, and look out upon that " glorious mirror 
where the Almighty's form glasses itself in 
tempests." 

" Eastward as far as the eye can see, 
Eastward, eastward, endlessly, 
The sparkle and tremor of purple sea." 



CONCERNING GOD. 99 

Surely what fills me with a joy so keen that it 
is almost pain is not alone the flashing tumult 
of the great expanse of waters ; it is also that, 
beyond where sky and water meet, with my 
mind's eye I see the mighty ocean reaching on 
and on, and beautiful with the same unspeaka- 
ble beauty as the little space that lies within my 
field of vision. It is the beauty of the known 
that makes the beauty of the unknown so sure 
and so entrancing. And just as surely my soul's 
" normal delight in the infinite God " is not 
produced by any purely negative unknown. 
No more is it by any positive known. No, but 
by my warrantable conviction that all the in- 
finite unknown is equally with the little territory 
which I know the haunt of nameless beauty, 
order, symmetry, and law. And so to those 
among us, and they are not few, who are en- 
deavoring to convince us that a purely negative 
mystery, an absolute unknown, is adequate to 
all the functions of a God whom we may rever- 
ence and adore, I answer in the words of Eng- 
land's greatest living theologian : " Far be it 



IOO THE FAITH OF REASON. 



' from us to deal lightly with the sense of mys- 
' tery. It mingles largely with all devout appre- 
' hension, and is the great redeeming power, that 
i purifies the intellect of its egotism and the heart 
i of its pride. But you cannot constitute a reli- 
' gion out of mystery alone, any more than out of 
' knowledge alone, nor can you measure the re- 
' lation of doctrines to humility and piety by the 
' mere amount of conscious darkness that they 
1 leave. All worship, being directed to what is 
' above us and transcends our comprehension, 
' stands in the presence of a mystery. But not 
' all that stands before a mystery is worship. 
'The abyss must not be one of total gloom — 
' of neutral possibilities — of hidden glories or 
' hidden horrors, we know not which. . . . Such 
' a pit of indeterminate contingencies will bend 
( no head, and melt no eye that may turn to it. 
' Some rays of clear light must escape from 
' it, some visions of solemn beauty gleam within 
' it, ere the darkness itself can be ' visible ' 
' enough to deliver its awfulness upon the 
' soul. . . . To fling us into bottomless nega- 



CONCERNING GOD. 



101 



"tion is to drown us in mystery and leave us 
" dead. True reverence can breathe and see, 
" only on condition of some alternation of light 
" and darkness, of inner silence and a stir of 
" upper air." 

Nor is there any thing in the necessities of 
the most 'rigid scientific thought which violates 
this condition; which precludes this happy al- 
ternation. " Though unknown, yet well known." 
Is he not this, — the God of scientific apprehen- 
sion? In any scientific sense, it must be granted 
that in himself he is unknown, unknowable; 
and must remain so always. But until I can 
know some one thing in the universe in itself y 
be that thing clod of earth or soul of man, I 
will not fret because I cannot know in itself 
the Infinite and Everlasting One. For what 
does my ignorance signify but that an unmani- 
fested infinite can never be found out; that an 
everlasting silence would be totally inaudible? 
" Vapid words," we say with Martineau, " in a 
universe full of visions and of voices ! " 

Meanwhile, though I acknowledge, unre- 



102 THE FAITH OF REASON. 



servedly, that the unspeakable majesty is in 
itself unknown, I insist that our ignorance should 
not, cannot be interpreted as describing absolute 
nonentity of perception and apprehension. Our 
very ignorance affirms the existence of an in- 
comprehensible substance of which the phe- 
nomenal universe is the perpetual manifestation. 
Our knowledge of God is of exactly the same 
nature as our knowledge of our neighbors and 
ourselves. We know him by the manifestations 
of his inscrutable life. If we are not so garru- 
lous as men were formerly about his attributes, 
we know a great deal more about his laws, the 
habits of his infinite life. What he determined 
in the most secret counsels of the Trinity before 
the beginning of time, the Calvins and the Ed- 
wardses have sufficiently discussed; and all who 
care for their results are welcome to embrace 
them. What we are sure of is, that the Unseen 
Power was adequate to the production of this 
universe, such as it is. He has put himself into 
his world as painters sometimes put themselves 
into their pictures ; not by painting himself, like 



CONCERNING GOD. 



IO3 



Raphael, in a corner, but by expressing his 
stupendous energy in every part. As much as 
we know of the universe, so much we know of 
God. Truly it is not much in comparison with 
what we do not know. " Lo, these are parts of 
his ways, but how little is yet known of him." 
And yet, though relatively little, absolutely 
much, and more with every new discovery of 
any fact or law. Now, indeed, for the first time 
Theology makes good her boast, Scientia scz- 
entiarum, the science of sciences; but not in the 
old sense of being superior to all others, rather 
in the sense of including all others. Henceforth 
all other sciences are fragments of theology; 
for all of them are busy with the manifestations 
of the one eternal substance in which all phe- 
nomena inhere. 

Modern science is unitarian, monotheistic, 
as never was the creed of Moses or Mohammed. 
She teaches us that all these nerves whose play 
upon the surface of the universe irradiate it 
with such various expression go back into one 
central ganglion, and ever more report its per- 



104 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

feet sanity. From all the peaks, from all the 
depths and heights, the different forms and forces 
of the world are signalling across to one another 
with fraternal salutations. A thousand and ten 
thousand various lines of force run back into 
one central stream whose ceaseless energy sup- 
plies them all. What was the wonder of that 
old homoousion, — one substance of the Son and 
Father, a barren abstraction, — to this homoiou- 
sio7ty like substance of all worlds, which modern 
astronomy has proved? From every quarter 
comes the news of this same unity and sym- 
pathy and harmony in the make of things. " It 
thunders all around." A universal solidarity 
bespeaks a central and abiding Oneness at the 
heart of things. 

Whether the infinite power, the infinite life, is 
personal or impersonal, is one of the questions 
about which those who are least qualified to 
speak are the most voluble. Can any one of 
them tell us what personality is? And till they 
can what right have they to say, " A god who 
is not personal is no god at all." The first use 



CONCERNING GOD. 105 

of this word person, which is from per and sono 
and means to sound through, was to designate 
one sounding through a mask the dramatic 
situations of some poet's verse. And as in the 
the great amphitheatre at Athens, the person and 
poet were sometimes the same, — even Sopho- 
cles speaking from behind the mask his own 
majestic words, — so always in this amphitheatre 
whose circle is the circle of the universe, the 
person and the poet are one : it is his own poem, 
neither tragedy nor comedy, but an epic which 
includes them both, and many a lyric passage 
of sweetness unimaginable till heard, that the 
Infinite recites, less, it may be, for our delight 
than because irresistibly self-stirred to self- 
expression. But, I am well aware, the sticklers 
for personality will not be put off with any such 
metaphor as this. If only we could all agree 
upon the meaning of personality, there might 
be less divergence in our thought than there is 
now. With some a person is an individual, a 
local deity. Such expect to see God when they 
die, and to recognize him by his resemblance to 



106 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

the conventional portraiture of Jesus, unaware 
that this is based upon an antique bust of Plato, 
which for a long time was supposed to be a 
bust of Christ. Many who declare that they do 
not believe in a personal god mean little more 
than that they do not believe in any such individ- 
ual god as this in any localized deity. But many 
who insist that God is personal are far enough 
from this pathetic puerility. What they mean 
by personality is conscious mind, or simply 
mind. The new psychology is making it a 
little easier for us to conceive of personality in 
this sense, as universally diffused. It refuses to 
locate the thinking apparatus solely in the brain. 
Rather every part of us seems to think or at 
least to be concerned in thinking. 

" Her pure and eloquent blood 
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought 
That one might almost say her body thought." 

So it becomes a little easier to conceive of 
infinite mind, of infinite thought and will, not 
here or there, but all-pervading. In this sense, 
shall we then say that God is personal? Or 



CONCERNING GOD. ioy 

shall we rather say that mind and thought and 
will and love, all personal words, are the least 
inadequate symbols that we have, or can have, 
of the Infinite Power, and try, always, to remem- 
ber that they are symbols, not exact expressions 
for that which cannot be expressed ? " God's 
thoughts are not our thoughts ; neither are his 
ways our ways." This is a real prophetic word, 
— prophetic of our wisest modern thought. 
Only let us not forget what follows : " For as 
the heavens are higher than the earth, so are 
his thoughts higher than our thoughts and his 
ways than our ways." There are those who 
seem to think that to deny personality to God is 
to assert that he is something less than personal. 
And with the materialist, if there be any such, 
who really imagines that out of mere dead mat- 
ter without any God-like energy behind it came 
this sublime and awful universe, the denial of 
personality to God may be to affirm that he is 
something less than personal. But this sort of 
a materialist is hard to find. He has only a 
verbal existence. My friend assures me we are 



108 THE FAITH OF REASON. 



looking up over our heads for an explanation 
which we should look for down under our feet. 
But no. If matter is the ultimate reality, then 
matter is not down under our feet, but up over 
our heads. The less does not produce the 
greater. There is an infinite element involved 
in every step of evolution. The ascending series 
can be accounted for only by supposing a higher 
than its highest, antecedent to its lowest term. 
But to deny personality to God is not necessarily 
to affirm that he is something less than personal. 
It may be to affirm that he is infinitely more. 
There are those who think the Infinite altogether 
such an one as themselves, as Caliban his " dam's 
god, Setebos," and such regard with pity and 
contempt, because they cannot say that God is 
personal, men who have each one of them reli- 
gion enough to set up a whole army of their assail- 
ants. But there are those who cannot say that 
God is personal, because they dare not apply to 
the Eternal the limitations of our human per- 
sonality. Not because they conceive of God as 
less than personal, but because they conceive of 



CONCERNING GOD. 109 

him as infinitely more, do they decline to call 
him so. If they were sure their words would be 
accepted as symbolical, then they might say, as I 
do, that personality is a far better symbol than 
impersonality of the inexpressible fact. 

But I should do injustice to those who con- 
tend most wisely and acutely for the idea of 
infinite personality, if I did not make haste to 
say that it is possible for these, as well as for 
their opponents, to affirm that God is more 
than personal. To affirm personality is not 
necessarily to affirm that this designation is 
exhaustive of the fulness of the infinite life. 
It is only to affirm that there are manifestations 
of this life which compel this designation in the 
absence of a better. There may, at the same 
time, be other manifestations, incalculably vast, 
which demand either a different designation, or 
that silence which is golden. This should not 
be forgotten. It is, too often, by those who re- 
fuse to speak of God as personal because he is 
to them more than personal. He may be more 
than personal to those who affirm his person- 
ality with the utmost confidence. 



no 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



The idea of consciousness, as included in 
the idea of personality, is often felt, on the one 
hand, to be the greatest stumbling-block, and, 
on the other, to be the most absolute desidera- 
tum. In the latter case is not the tendency 
conspicuous to make the Infinite " altogether 
such an one as ourselves "? Yet, though I do 
not see that the alternative of consciousness is 
" a blind force," that bugbear of the popular 
theology, one thing, at least, is certain, — that 
the non-ability to scientifically discover con- 
sciousness in the universe is no sign it is not 
there, nor even a hint that it is not. We are so 
sure of nothing else as of our own consciousness, 
and yet what scientific evidence have we of 
its existence? Not a particle. The saying of 
Lawrence that his scalpel found no soul in the 
brain has been thought by would-be atheists a 
confirmation of La Place's saying that his tele- 
scope, scanning the whole heavens, found no 
trace of God. In fact it negatives it altogether. 
If the scalpel had found a soul, we might perhaps 
expect the telescope to find a God. The fact 



CONCERNING GOD. 



Ill 



that it has not, while still we know that it exists, 
establishes a vast presumption in favor of a uni- 
versal mind. But if an infinite mind, says Du 
Bois Reymond, then too an infinite brain. Well, 
one of the atomic philosophers has said that, if 
we could see the dance of atoms, it would be not 
unlike the dance of constellations. Whereupon, 
Mr. Martineau turns round upon Reymond, and 
says : " If the structure and movement of atoms 
" do but repeat in little those of the heavens, what 
" hinders us from inverting the analogy, and say- 
" ing that the ordered heavens repeat the rhythm 
"of the cerebral particles? You need an em- 
" bodied mind? Lift up your eyes and look upon 
" the arch of night as the brow of the Eternal, its 
" constellations as the molecules of the universal 
" consciousness and its ethereal waves as media 
" of omniscient thought." As an argumentum ad 
hominem this could not be better, but Mr. Mar- 
tineau knows as well as anybody that once sure 
of such a cosmic brain the philosophers would 
immediately attribute it to " some cosmic mega- 
therium," not to the great first cause. Doubtless 



112 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

t 

if this is conscious, its consciousness like gravi- 
tation reports itself at every point, and is not 
central but ubiquitous. Enough that infinite 
consciousness can never be disproved, and that, 
if there be no such consciousness, then there is 
something better, else could it never be in us. 

If it could be generally understood that the 
language of religion is not scientific but poetical, 
we might freely make use of various expressions 
which now it seems almost our duty to avoid ; 
we might, for example, speak of the creation of 
the world and of God as the Creator, as naturally 
as we now speak of the sun's rising and setting, 
although we know our words entirely fail to rep- 
resent the fact. " In the beginning God created 
the heavens and the earth ?" Then the begin- 
ning is not over yet, for he is still at work upon 
his world. The old doctrine of creation pictured 
an eternal being, dwelling in loneliness until about 
six thousand years ago, when suddenly he awoke 
and became active, created matter out of nothing, 
and the universe out of matter, and then relapsed 
again into quiescence. Harried by geologist and 



CONCERNING GOD. 113 

astronomer, the expounders of this scheme agreed 
to interpret liberally the six days of creation, and 
put back the beginning to some infinitely dis- 
tant past. But no such concession can relieve 
the scheme of its essential incoherence and 
absurdity. Philosophy opposes its incorrigible 
ex nihilo nihil — nothing from nothing — and 
science brings a thousand arguments to prove 
the indestructibility and consequent eternity 
of matter. The conception of matter as a 
" datum objective to God," a finite substance 
lying over against his infinite, is inconceivably 
absurd. It but remains for us to consider the 
material universe as in no sense foreign to God. 

" All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul." 

If this is Pantheism, it is no worse for being so. 
For in one form or another Pantheism has always 
been the doctrine of the most religious souls. 
The idea of a mechanical Creator coalesces at 
no single point with this conception. He was 
supposed to be outside the universe working 
upon it like a watchmaker at work upon a watch. 



114 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

But the watch proves to be so big that there is 
no room outside of it, no outer darkness. " This 
thing was not done in a corner." 

" God dwells in all, and moves the world, and moulds, 
Himself and Nature in one form enfolds." 

This is the new doctrine of creation. Only it 
is not creation. It is evolution. God is no 
builder, no architect, no infinite mechanician. A 
rose upon its stem in June is a more adequate 
symbol of his unfolding life than any Christopher 
Wren or Michael Angelo. From within outwards, 
not from without inwards, is the procession of 
the Holy Spirit. 

" The flower horizons open, 

The blossom vaster shows, 

We hear the wide worlds echo, 
' See how the lily grows ! ' " 

Friends, I have kept you long ; and still I have a 
hundred things to say. But they will keep against 
another time. The one thing I have tried to do 
this morning is to clear the god-idea of that ap- 
pearance of unreality which attaches to its earliest 
forms ; to show you that at every step the un- 



CONCERNING GOD. 115 

reality inhered not in the essence, but in the ac- 
cidents of the idea ; to show you that, as it has 
come down to us, it is no mere survival of an 
ancient superstition, but the legitimate product 
of men's enraptured recognition of the mysterious 
Power which manifests itself in all the marvellous 
uniformities of universal nature and life. Further 
than this, I have endeavored to turn a ray of light 
on some of the more prominent questions which 
are engaging the attention of the more thoughtful 
persons of our time ; to show you that a purely 
negative mystery is by no means equal to the 
proper function of the God-idea, that it can right- 
fully demand no reverence, inspire no sacred 
awe, beget no holy trust; and, finally, to suggest 
that even such shibboleths as " personality " and 
" creation " can be pronounced sibboleth, or re- 
main quite unspoken, and the protesting mind 
still entertain the God-idea in a more worthy 
form than that of its conventional exponents. 
But, after all that has been said, how infinitesimal 
it seems in contrast with the supreme idea it has 
sought to honor ! O God, we thank thee that 



1 16 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

our joy and peace and satisfaction and delight 
in thee are not dependent on our ability to speak 
of thee aright; that deeper than all speech, all 
thought, the sense abides in us of thy ineffable 
mystery, thy glorious power, thy steadfast law, 
thine everlasting faithfulness, thy constant pres- 
ence, and thy perfect love ! 

" Thy voice is on the rolling air, 

I hear thee where the waters run, 
Thou standest in the rising sun, 
And in the setting thou art fair. 

" What art thou then ? I cannot guess ; 
But though I seem in star and flower 
To feel thee, some diffusive power, 
I do not therefore love thee less. 

" Far off thou art, but ever nigh ; 
I have thee still and I rejoice : 
I prosper circled by thy voice ; 
I shall not lose thee though I die." 



January 19, 1879. 



IV. 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 

r J^HE subject of my discourse this morning 
has been always and everywhere, almost 
without exception, one of engrossing interest. 
The literature of the subject is one of the most 
convincing evidences of this that can be shown. 
Some fifteen years ago Professor Ezra Abbot 
made a list of authors who had treated of the 
future life, and of their books. It contained 
between five and six thousand names and titles. 
The list was necessarily imperfect. Then, too, 
it was a list of books which still exist. As 
many more no doubt have sunk into an oblivion 
deeper than any bibliographer or bibliomaniac 
can go down. If more had done so, Professor 
Abbot's list would have been shorter, but the 
world would not have suffered by the loss. 
Again, if Professor Abbot's list had come down 



Il8 THE FAITH OF REASON, 

to 1879, it would have contained, perhaps, the 
names of twice as many authors and books. 
For never, I imagine, has the subject of Immor- 
tality been so fruitful of printed discussion as 
during the last dozen years. And yet, if we 
could have all the books that have ever been 
printed on this subject, and all that have not 
been printed, — doubtless a greater host, — and 
all the sermons that have been written upon it, 
and all the poems, like the stars in heaven for 
multitude, we should still have no adequate ex- 
ponent of the interest humanity has taken in 
this theme. For this interest antedates the 
earliest literary expression by hundreds and 
thousands of years. Before the invention of the 
first rude alphabet, a ruder faith in immortality 
had stirred the savage heart alike with hope 
and fear. And, since the beginning of man's 
literary life, hundreds of millions who have 
never written sermon, or book, or poem, or 
even one poor word, have through their per- 
sonal experience of loss and death, been led to 
wonder what could be the meaning of it all. 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 1 9 

One of our modern sculptors has made an Eve 
and Abel, the ideal mother of humanity con- 
fronting for the first time the mysterious fact of 
death embodied in her child. What is the sleep 
from which no voice can waken ? Science for- 
bids us to conceive any such newness and sur- 
prise of death as that. But art has never had a 
more suggestive theme. The genius of Michael 
Angelo could not have exhausted it. Yet the 
last mother would afford him a far better subject 
than the first. For death is not less wonderful 
to us than it was to our remotest ancestors. 
Nay, it is far more wonderful. Even the objec- 
tive fact is different. That death should be the 
" end-all " of the primeval savage is conceivable. 
That it should be the end-all of Shakspere, of 
Socrates, of Jesus, — that is another matter. 
But the subjective power of wonder has under- 
gone an equal if not greater change. And, 
taking subject and object together, surely never, 
since thought and death began their great career, 
has thought confronted death with such a look, 
— so full of earnest questioning — as that which 



120 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



now half shadows, half irradiates, the solemn 
beauty of her face. 

But the subject is so closely implicated with 
men's personal experience, their sorrow for 
their dead, their individual hopes of a hereafter, 
in which love shall reunite its broken chain, 
that there is hardly any task from which the 
preacher would more willingly be exempt than 
the subjection of this matter to the impartial 
tests of reason and science. The multiplication 
of railroads in China is said to be hopelessly 
impeded by the veneration of the people for 
their graves. The engineer cannot cut through 
them; he must go round them, — a difficult 
matter in a land so full of graves. A similar 
difficulty meets the scientific thinker when he 
would deal with immortality. Somebody's 
grave is always in the way. Not to go straight 
ahead is to spoil his science, as for the engi- 
neer it is to spoil his road. But has he the 
heart to do it ? Not often, it must be confessed. 
I have read hundreds of sermons and essays 
which set out to do so bravely enough, not one 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. ' 121 

of which held straight on to the goal. As Mi- 
lanion's golden apples arrested Atalanta's flying 
feet, so here the heart of some poor stricken 
one, lying there bleeding in the way, that must 
be taken up and stanched and soothed. But 
they are few who even propose to themselves to 
apply reason and science to this theme. The 
majority imagine that it does not come within 
their sphere, and some who are not of this 
majority are satisfied with presenting to their 
hearers a set of reasons for believing in a future 
life, not one of which has any weight with them, 
but which many of their hearers think entirely 
conclusive, simply because they have never had 
a doubt. I could do this this morning, and I 
could do it so adroitly that without committing 
myself I could give you the impression that to 
my own mind my set of reasons left nothing to 
be desired. But some of you would think me 
easily convinced, and I should think myself one 
of many who in these latter days defile the 
preacher's office with their appalling insin- 
cerity; " liars for God," not all of whom are 
" orthodox." 



122 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

To speak one's frankest word concerning God 
may be less difficult than to speak it concerning 
immortality. For there are people who if they 
told you true would rather give up their belief 
in God than their belief in immortality. It is 
not that their dread of self-extinction is so 
great ; but that some one has gone away from 
them whom they would climb to meet again, if 
need be, on the ruins of the universe. It is this 
fact which must make the doctrine ever vener- 
able. It is the apotheosis of love. Whatever 
may have been the stronghold of this doctrine 
in times past, to-day it is the passionate tender- 
ness of human hearts. It gives back the object 
of affection. A few may cling to it for other 
reasons. The majority cling to it for this alone. 
I know that there are those who allow that this 
is so, and therefore condemn the doctrine as 
utterly selfish. Ah, but the good desired, and 
which this faith assures, is not so much love- 
getting as love-giving! It is those who have 
given the most whose longing after immortality 
is most intense. Grant that there is nothing 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 23 

specially religious in such a longing. But there 
is something eternally beautiful; something 
which should speak to the most sceptical as 
they approach it, saying as the god said to 
Moses in the grand old Hebrew fable, " Take 
off thy shoes from off thy feet; for the spot 
whereon thou standest is holy ground. " 

It is not uncommon in these latter days to 
hear men speak of immortality as if the doc- 
trine were essentially ignoble. But, to my 
mind, even if this doctrine could be shown to 
have no reasonableness whatever, it would still 
be, after the thought of God, the brightest 
crown which has adorned the brows of our 
humanity in all the past. Whatever else it has 
been, this doctrine has been the glorious symbol 
of man's self-respect; presumptuous perhaps, 
but better this than self-despising. I know 
well enough that the doctrine is not necessarily 
noble. A minister of the Established Church of 
Scotland has recently written, " However differ- 
ent the representations of heaven, they all agree 
in representing it as a state of gratified and glori- 



124 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

fied selfishness; of blessedness which appeals 
above all to selfish desire and selfish hope." A 
sweeping statement this ; too sweeping to be true, 
and yet with an amount of truth in it that is terri- 
ble to think of. But let the w T orst that can be said 
with truth be said. Let all the meanness, all the 
superstition, and all the selfishness that have in- 
hered in this doctrine, be charged against it. 
What an indictment it would be, and yet how 
far from exhausting the capacity or the historic 
significance of this doctrine ! For what has 
kept the doctrine alive in spite of so much base 
interpretation is, that it has been the symbol of 
man's self-respect, self-reverence ; the measure 
of his awe in the presence of his own intellectual 
and moral nature ; and of his assurance that love 
is stronger than death. To represent this doc- 
trine as necessarily or always selfish and ignoble, 
is to ignore some of the grandest chapters in 
the history of human nature. Taken at its 
worst, in ancient or in modern times, and there 
is nothing more contemptible than this same 
doctrine, of selfishness and meanness all com- 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY, 12$ 

pact. But, taken at its best, there is nothing 
more exalted and exalting. Prove it has no 
validity whatever, and it is still the peer of any 
star that ever sparkled in the firmament of 
thought. Prove it the grand mistake > and it is a 
mistake which reflects more honor on humanity 
than hundreds of its verifiable truths. 

We are indebted to Frances Power Cobbe, I 
believe, for the phrase " magnanimous atheism." 
Corresponding to this phrase, there is a possible 
reality which may not be ignored. And as 
there is " magnanimous atheism," so there may 
be magnanimous doubt and even dogmatic 
denial of immortality, whose motto is, 

" Is there no second life ; pitch this one high." 

But as all atheism is not magnanimous, so is 
not all doubt of immortality or all denial. 
There are those who plume themselves upon 
their disbelief, as if it were something very grand 
and fine to say, " I do not care to be immortal." 
But not to care to be immortal argues not great- 
ness but littleness of mind. The magnanimous 



126 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



doubter or denier is the man who does care for 
it mightily, who resents with all the energy of 
his mind and heart the indignity of absolute 
annihilation, but who accepts his fate with 
courage, because it seems to him a neces- 
sary part of the beneficent order of the uni- 
verse. Not care to be immortal? Have you 
ever thought, have you ever loved, have you 
ever worshipped, and can yet say this? I do 
care for it. Prove to me that I have no reason 
to believe in it or hope for it, and I will bear 
my fate as best I can. But I can never cease to 
care for it. 

To give the reasons which men assign for 
their belief in immortality, is not to account 
for their belief, — its strength and permanence. 
Their reasons, for the most part, are not rea- 
sons, only excuses for an instinctive faith. That 
there is this instinctive faith is with some minds 
an argument for it that precludes the need of 
any other. And so long as this instinctive faith 
was regarded as a component part of the mind 
as such, not something acquired, and God was 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 27 

thought to be the maker of the mind, just as a 
man is the ma'ker of a watch ; so long it might 
very naturally be regarded as a proof of the 
objective reality of the immortal life. But what 
if the instinctive faith is but the last result of 
the faith of innumerable ancestors, a faith based 
upon reasons more or less fanciful? Such is 
the latest diagnosis of the psychologists. We 
organically inherit the faiths of the past, but 
not the reasons of the men of the past for hold- 
ing these faiths. And not inheriting the reasons, 
we infer that the instinctive faiths are super- 
rational; ineradicable factors of the mind as 
such. Psychology dissipating this idea, and 
showing that present instinct is the product of 
past reason, it becomes the duty of every person 
who desires to live a rational, not merely an 
instinctive life, to bring his inherited instincts to 
the bar of present reason and see what they are 
worth. If the verdict is unfavorable, the in- 
stincts may still triumphantly assert themselves, 
and hence the contradiction of the head and 
heart noticeable in so many lives. The ma- 



128 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



jority are satisfied with an instinctive life. That 
you are not is evident from your being here. 
If you are believing yourselves immortal because 
of some remote ancestor's childish philosophy 
of sleep and dreams, you want to know it. To 
wilfully cherish an illusion, known to be such, 
or even suspected of being such, may do for 
cowards. It will not do for honest and cour- 
ageous men and women. 

Consider, then, with me some of the reasons 
which have resulted in the instinctive faith of 
modern men in immortality. Apparently it was 
the analogy of sleep and death which first sug- 
gested to mankind the survival of the soul upon 
the cessation of the body from its ordinary 
functions. During the stillness of sleep, the soul 
was thought to be absent from the body and to 
waken it on its return. So when death's deeper 
stillness supervened, the soul was only thought 
to be away upon a longer journey, and all the 
care with which the lifeless form was cherished 
was inspired by the idea that it would some day 
be occupied again by its former tenant. For so 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 29 

many thousands of years did men live con- 
tentedly in this order of ideas that to this day 
the thought and speech of cultivated men is 
often a survival of this order in various par- 
ticulars. But, in view of such an order of ideas, 
shall we say that the primeval man's conception 
of himself as having a soul was a pitiful miscon- 
ception which has been perpetuated to the 
present time? Yes his conception of himself as 
having a souL This was a misconception. But 
this misconception was his puerile explanation 
of the fact that he was a soul : the fact I say, 
for, if it be not a fact, its not being so yet re- 
mains to be shown. In his latest utterance, 1 
Professor Tyndall has confessed his inability to 
make any such showing. What the primeval 
man could not account for — the mystery of 
consciousness — no more can he. " We have 
made no step," he says, " towards its solution." 
And again, " A mighty mystery still looms, be- 
fore us, and thus it will ever loom." " It is no 
" explanation," he continues, " to say that the 
" subjective and objective are two sides of one 



130 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

" and the same phenomena. Why should phe- 
nomena have two sides? There are plenty of 
" molecular motions which do not exhibit this 
" two-sidedness. Does water think or feel 
" when it runs into frost ferns upon a window- 
-pane? If not, why should the molecular mo- 
" tions of the brain be yoked to this mysterious 
" companion consciousness? " 

It was to account for " this mysterious com- 
panion consciousness " that the primeval man 
resorted to his crude philosophy of sleep and 
dreams. It was the analogy of sleep and death 
which first suggested to him that " this myste- 
rious companion consciousness " was still ex- 
istent when it came back no more into its former 
tenement, looked out no more from the poor 
sightless eyes. But it is not as if this primitive 
idea of immortality had not been revised a 
thousand times since its original genesis. At 
this remove, it is in vain to try to bring dis- 
credit on the doctrine by taunting it with the 
provisional form it first assumed. The deepen- 
ing of man's self-consciousness insured its con- 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 131 

tinuity. What wonder that uncultivated men 
distinguished sharply between that mystic I and 
its bodily environment, when even the most 
searching scrutiny of modern science is totally 
unable to express consciousness in physical 
terms ! And certainly, till science can do this, 
the hope of immortality is indefeasible for those 
who care to cherish it. 

But a hope is one thing and a dogma is 
another. The dogma of immortality, as a 
Christian dogma, rests, with conscious security, 
upon the fact, or supposed fact, of the resurrec- 
tion of Jesus from the dead. It has been the 
habit of the Christian preacher, in the great 
majority of instances, to insist upon the abso- 
lute futility of all other evidence, the absolute 
sufficiency of this. To this day there are Uni- 
tarian ministers who assure their congregations 
that if this fails, " The pillared firmament is 
rottenness and earth's base built on stubble ; " 
that elsewhere there is not a hint of consolation. 
If this be so, the sooner we abandon every hope 
of immortality the better. Better expect the 



132 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

i 

worst, and then, perhaps, be gloriously dis- 
appointed, than hang our hope upon so fine a 
thread as Jesus' resurrection. For even if this 
were an incontestable fact, what would it prove? 
Says a Unitarian minister, " If the ' body of 
Jesus should now be found in some Jewish 
sepulchre, my faith in immortality would be 
gone." The meaning is that then he would be 
sure it did not ascend up into heaven. But 
how does the ascension of Jesus into heaven, 
"with his flesh and bones," as the Prayer Book 
of the Church of England boldly but honestly 
phrases it, argue our bodiless ascent, immedi- 
ately on the event of death or at some distant 
resurrection in our rehabilitated flesh? But 
Jesus was a supernatural being, a god or demi- 
god or super-angelic or angelic being. How 
then does his resurrection prove any thing 
for us? What man has done man may do, but 
not necessarily what some super-human being 
may do in virtue of his supernatural power. 
But even if the fact of Jesus' resurrection were 
a sufficient proof of universal immortality, who 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 33 

shall assure us of the fact. The principal docu- 
ments relating it, the four gospels, made their 
appearance from seventy-five to one hundred 
years after the death of Jesus. The different 
narratives abound in contradictions which no' 
ingenuity can harmonize. Agreeing in such 
particulars as are natural and easy to believe, 
they differ in all others. The nearest approach 
we make to the event is in Paul's account of it 
in his Epistle to the Corinthians. He relates 
the different appearances of the risen Jesus, and 
winds up his testimony, " And last of all he was 
seen of me also." So then he did not regard 
any of the previous appearances as different 
from that which he had himself enjoyed, which 
was a manifest hallucination. His vision was 
unshared by his companions. Such testimony 
is the ruin of the argument. And yet the 
resurrection of Jesus has for eighteen centuries 
been the foundation of the Christian's hope 
of immortality ! Was ever so much believed 
upon such paltry evidence? Did ever pyra- 
mid so huge rest on so frail an apex? 



134 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

Whatever the resurrection of Jesus might 
prove, it cannot itself be proved ; and, if proved 
ever so conclusively, it would only prove that 
Jesus rose again, not that one other ordinary 
mortal could do that which he accomplished 
only in virtue of his supernatural power. 
Equally inefficacious are the teachings of Jesus 
on this head, however authoritative they are 
allowed to be. There are many passages in the 
New Testament which assert the immortality of 
the believer. There is hardly one which asserts 
the natural and universal immortality of man. 
The nearest approach to such an assertion as- 
cribed to Jesus is the merest verbal quibble 
which, let us hope, he never uttered. The Sad- 
ducees denied the resurrection, and Jesus is rep- 
resented as confounding them with the Old 
Testament phrase " the God of Abraham and 
Isaac and Jacob. " If he is the God of these, 
they must be still alive or destined to revive, 
" for God is not the God of the dead, but the 
God of the living." This is the sort of argu- 
ment that was convincing eighteen hundred 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY, 135 

years ago! But even if Jesus had affirmed the 
natural and universal immortality of man a 
hundred times in unmistakable language, his 
affirmation would not prove any thing but his 
belief. If we can trust the record, he believed 
in demoniacal possession, in a personal devil, 
in a literal, fiery hell. The genius of Jesus was 
not intellectual, but moral. He accepted the 
doctrines current in his time, and made them 
the vehicles of his enthusiasm for righteousness. 
We are not called on to believe any thing upon 
his ipse dixit. And, if we were, we cannot be 
certain that he said one single thing that is as- 
cribed to him in the New Testament. 

The instinctive or intuitive belief of men in 
immortality, inside of Christendom, has rested 
almost entirely on the resurrection of Jesus and 
the assumption of his authoritative teaching. 
To the extent that it has done so, the intuition 
is discharged of all validity. It makes no differ- 
ence that the modern intuition is not consciously 
based on these foundations. If a child is not 
legitimately born, his ignorance of his parentage 



136 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

does not make him any more legitimate. The 
intuition being thus discredited by the explana- 
tion of its genesis and growth, and the direct 
argument from the resurrection or the teachings 
of Jesus proving, at the same time, worthless, 
what other arguments are there to take the 
place of this? Christian theology has for the 
most part denied that there are any, in order 
thus to enhance the reverence of men for its 
peculiar dogma. But there have always been 
some Christian theologians who have been 
pleased to think of Christianity as a republica- 
tion of natural religion. Such have been glad 
to fortify their supernatural position with out- 
works of natural reason. And there have 
always been still wiser men than these, whom the 
apparent insufficiency of the supernatural has 
compelled to seek for other and more satisfac- 
tory arguments. Let us consider some of these. 

One is that the soul is immaterial, and there- 
fore cannot perish. In such an argument, there 
is nothing worth considering. Who told you that 
no immaterial thing can perish? And are you 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 37 

absolutely certain that the soul is immaterial? 
An astonishing syllogism this, in which the 
major and the minor premises are equally as- 
sumptions pure and simple. If only we were 
certain that the soul is a material substance, 
then indeed we might be certain of its in- 
destructibility. But if it is a material substance, 
as some have ingeniously argued, this substance 
has so far eluded all investigation. 

Another argument for immortality is based 
on the universality of the belief in it. But the 
belief in it is not universal, and the only un- 
believers are not, as was once assumed, the 
idiots. Huxley and Tyndall and Morley are 
several removes from idiocy. And there are 
hundreds who have nearly as much intellect as 
these and quite as little faith. And there are 
other breaks in the chain of universality much 
more significant than these, involving the ab- 
sence-of this belief, at least in any vital form, 
from mighty populations. But even if there 
were not a single break in it, even if the belief 
were absolutely universal, I do not see that it 



138 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



would prove the fact. Did not men universally 
believe for thousands of years that the sun went 
round the earth, while all the time the earth 
was going round the sun? "Whom God de- 
ceives are well deceived," said Goethe; which 
I interpret that the universal misconceptions of 
humanity are necessary steps in the evolution 
of intelligence, and so do not impeach the san- 
ity or integrity of the universal order. 

Another argument for immortality closely 
allied with this from universal belief is that 
from universal desire. 

" Whatever crazy sorrow saith, 
No life that breathes with human breath 
Has ever truly longed for death. 

" Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, 
O life, not death, for which we pant, 
More life, and fuller, that I want." 

It may be so, although the Buddhist longing for 
Nirvana is a remarkable chapter in the book 
of universal desire for immortality. But the 
Buddhist longing for Nirvana, which was as 
near as might be to annihilation, was no doubt 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 139 

the outcome of intolerable social conditions. 
Such have often resulted in a passionate desire 
for immortality. Apparently the conditions of 
Hindu life were so intolerable that the victim 
could not conceive of any life that would be 
worth the having. But even if the desire for 
immortality were universal, I do not see that 
this would prove the fact any more than would 
a universal belief. It is easy enough to say with 
Fourier, " The attractions are proportioned to 
the destinies. " But every man of us has proved 
the falsity of this in his own personal experi- 
ence. The desire for immortality, if universal, 
might still be only the ideal exponent of the 
universal instinct of self-preservation, — here 
rendered more intense by the satisfactions, and 
there by the disabilities of the present life. 

Another argument is from the need of immor- 
tality, not the felt need, which is equivalent to 
the desire which we have just considered. 
Light for the eye because it needs it, air for the 
lungs because they need it, and so immortality 
for the soul because it needs it. But in our 



140 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

new philosophy it is the light that builds the 
eye; the air that builds the lungs. Is it the 
immortality that builds the soul? Sure of the 
need of immortality, and it would indeed imply 
a radical defect in the divine order for there to 
be no provision for such a need. But if you 
are going to prove the need of immortality, you 
must go much deeper than these analogies of 
light and air. 

Men say that it is needed for the reward and 
punishment of deeds done in the body. But, 
to my thinking, all such deeds are adequately 
punished and rewarded here and now. Still 
there are times when there appears to be no 
outward retribution, when evil courses do not 
seem to mar the body's strength; when the 
dishonest man goes unsuspected, and the honest 
man is unjustly suspected and condemned. 
Why but because the reward of every good or 
evil action is immediate. " Blessed are they who 
are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs 
is the kingdom of heaven." Is now, not will 
be by and by. So far is this assigned relation 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 141 

between immortality and virtue from being an 
argument -for the former, that it is the greatest 
evil which it has to answer for. It has de- 
moralized morality. It has prevented men's 
' pursuing virtue virtuously/ It has infected 
goodness with ulterior greed. It is a monstrous 
thing to say that, if there is no other life, then 
this can be degraded without blame. 

" Hath man no second life ? pitch this one highP 

The purest sanction and the grandest inspira- 
tion of morality is the necessity which is laid 
upon us by our innumerable benefactors, in 
the past and present, of doing what we can to 
make life sane and sweet for those around us 
and those who will come after us. 

Another argument for immortality is the in- 
equality of human conditions. Scriptural say- 
ings are not wanting in support of such an 
argument, " Go to, ye rich men, weep and howl, 
for you have received your consolation." " Now 
Lazarus is comforted, and you, Dives, are tor- 
mented." The New Testament idea is that, 



142 THE FAITH OF REASON, 

under the new regime, the poor of this world 
are going to be rich, and vice versa. Hence 
voluntary poverty with a view to being a celes- 
tial millionnaire. This formerly, but latterly 
voluntary poverty is infrequent. Men prefer 
being millionnaires now, and risking " the sweet 
by and by." Is the equality of human fortunes 
in another life any more desirable than their 
reversal? Is the inequality here so great as is 
imagined ? I would not change with any living 
Vanderbilt or Stewart. It may be yonder scav- 
enger would not if he could get inside their 
inner consciousness. Again, of human ine- 
quality how much is the result of strenuous 
well-doing on the one hand; of neglect upon 
the other? But there is real inequality for 
which the victim is not consciously or actually 
responsible. Yes ; but it is no proof of immor- 
tality. If the unseen power is such a power 
that it can permit inequality here, why not else- 
where? It may be the defect of his excellence. 
It may be, it is, an incident of social evolution, 
a temporary maladjustment, which, so far as 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 143 

need be, the wisdom of the coming genera- 
tions will correct. 

I am aware that a complete survey of the 
arguments by which the modern mind sustains 
its faith in immortality ought to include the 
remarkable development called Spiritualism, 
which has been so conspicuous within the last 
five and twenty years. Within the boundaries 
of Christendom, it can be safely said there is no 
faith in immortality so strong and glad as that 
of the Spiritualist. His other life is an extension 
of the present, with its attendant occupations 
and delights. While the average Christian faith 
is conventional, the Spiritualist's is thoughtful. 
His thought may not be always logical ; but it is 
thought, and not mere acquiescence. He means 
it shall be scientific. And if he has been treated 
scornfully by many scientific men, he has con- 
verted others, — not a few ; among them, Alfred 
Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of the 
principle of natural selection, the peer of any 
scientist now living. Of such a development as 
this, the epithets of Carlyle, " ultra-materialism, 



144 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

ultra-brutalism," are not exhaustive, whatever 
elements inhere in it to which these epithets 
belong. 

I do not speak from personal experience, but 
I believe that Spiritualism has developed certain 
wonderful phenomena, for which the evidence 
is a thousand times as strong as for any New 
Testament wonder. But between these phe- 
nomena and the affirmation that they are caused 
by disembodied spirits, the gulf is one I cannot 
leap, for it is simply infinite. In the absence of 
other known causes of phenomena, to predicate 
spiritual intervention seems to me precisely on 
a par with the proceedings of the prehistoric 
man, who posited a ghost as the efficient cause 
of every thing he could not otherwise explain. 
Until we have sounded the abyss of man's in- 
telligence, and mapped out all the possible 
relations of mind with mind, we have no right 
to predicate an unknown agent. So much is 
evidently the mere reflection of the seeker's 
mind upon the medium's, or the discoloration of 
the medium's own, that the anticipation that all 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 45 



may be one of these things or the other is not 
irrational. Messages claiming to be from my 
departed friends have frequently been brought 
to me. I know they never came from them. 
They have not the accent of their individuality. 
If they have fallen so from their original estate, 
I could desire their death had been complete 
annihilation. " If these reports are true," says 
Mr. Emerson, " we must invent a more definite 
suicide,'' something that will be equally fatal to 
mind and body. I would give as much as any 
one to really hear from my lost friends, but I 
must not fool myself into mistaking the echo of 
my voice, or any go-between's, for their celestial 
talk. 

The Swedenborgian doctrine is the oligarchic, 
autocratic counterpart of Spiritualism, which is 
essentially democratic. The Swedenborgians 
hate the Spiritualists more than they do the 
sceptics, because they have questioned their 
monopoly. But there is as good evidence that 
a thousand spiritualist mediums have been intro- 
mitted into the spiritual world, as that Sweden- 



I46 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

borg was so intr omitted. And so the evidence 
of the spiritualist revelation is a thousand times 
as good as that of the Swedenborgian. On the 
other hand, the ethical wisdom of Swedenborg 
is much superior to any which Spiritualism has 
yet developed, to my knowledge. It is here that 
Swedenborg cannot be too highly praised. But 
when he talks of heaven, all is so stupid and 
mechanical that to invent a method of annihi- 
lation would be the sole enthusiasm and relief 
of its unhappy population. 

The Spiritualist and Swedenborgian frequently 
plead the comfort of their views as a ground of 
their validity. Here is no argument; rather a 
bribe. If I were sure that comfort is the chief 
end of man, then it would be an argument. 
But I am not sure of this ; no one is sure of it. 
Nor do I want a world with so much comfort in 
it that there is no room for courage, none for 
simple endurance, since without the opportunity 
for these humanity would shrivel to a fraction 
of its present amplitude. That a doctrine is 
comforting cannot prove that it is true in such 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 47 

a world as this, where the unseen power is not al- 
ways soft with us, but sometimes stern enough. 
As with special forms, so with the general doc- 
trine : its truth has been inferred from its com- 
fortable aspect. I find a better argument for it 
in the fact that men have clung to it in spite of 
any lack of comfort. For, taken all the way 
through, not comfort, but lack of comfort, has 
been its most conspicuous quality. Than the 
assumption that the doctrine of immortality has 
always been pre-eminently comforting, nothing 
could be more unwarranted. Taken through 
all its course, its terrors have a thousand times 
outweighed its charms. It is only within the 
present century that it has assumed that senti- 
mental form which makes it seem so comforting. 
But to this day, for the deeply thoughtful, it has 
certain aspects so painful that it sometimes 
appears to them a doubtful good, and more 
desirable the lot 

" Of happy men that have the power to die." 

So far I have had a most ungracious office 



148 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



laid upon me: to convict one after another of 
the popular arguments for immortality of insuffi- 
ciency. It would have been vastly pleasanter 
to find each one of them sufficient by itself, and 
all of them together overwhelmingly so. Was 
never assurance of immortality more strong, 
was never dream of it more beautiful, than the 
assurance and the dream I would have built for 
you out of these popular arguments, if they 
would have borne their own weight, and lent 
each other a little mutual support. And it may 
be that I have undervalued them. The temp- 
tation to overvalue them is so strong that, in 
attempting to resist this, I may have erred upon 
the other side. But better so than give you 
doubtful reasons. If we suspect a leak in our 
ship's hold, let us not walk her sunny deck in 
feigned security. Let us go down into her hold, 
and rummage there, and see what is the matter. 
First, last, and always, let us know the facts. 
Once known, we can, I am persuaded, adjust 
ourselves to them in some creditable manner. 
But to cherish an illusion is to forfeit that self- 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 149 

respect which is the good man's best estate, the 
fountain of his purest consolation. 

Let us know the facts. But there are other 
facts than those involved in our destructive 
criticism of the popular intuition and its argu- 
mentative supports. First of all, there is this 
stupendous fact of consciousness, of personality. ' 
This I have said already is the indefeasible basis 
of our hope of immortality. Here it is; and 
science, in the person of her most " vigorous 
and rigorous " hierophant, declares that she has 
made no step towards the solution of its mys- 
tery. That this consciousness has somehow 
emerged from matter, science is confident; but 
of the manner of this emergence she does not 
presume to speak. It is as inconceivable in the 
brain as it would be in a grape-vine or a piece 
of granite. But here it is; of all things the 
most indubitable. What a stupendous marvel is 
here: matter becoming conscious of itself; in- 
terpreting the universe, thinking God's thoughts 
after him ! What does it show if not that life 
and thought were somehow resident in matter 



150 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

from the first ? Else how emerged ? It is super- 
fluous to say that science cannot predicate the 
destruction of " this mysterious companion " 
with the dissolution of the body. That which 
she cannot express in any physical term, that 
which she cannot connect with any function of 
the body or the brain, is absolutely safe from 
her destroying hand. If she cannot affirm its 
superiority to the accident of death, no more 
can she deny it. And in this inability we have 
the negative condition of a boundless hope for 
all who wish to cherish it. 

To this negative condition let us see what can 
be added. This positive condition first of all: 
the persistency in some form of this force of 
personality. It may be dissipated, but it cannot 
be destroyed. Whether it is matter or force, 
this is equally certain. Now then, suppose a 
Shakspere, tired of the life of the metropolis, 
having made a snug fortune, which he is pleas- 
antly conscious of, and a fame world-wide and 
century-enduring, which he is hardly conscious 
of at all, goes back to Stratford with the hope 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY, 15 I 

of living there a quiet, comfortable life, when 
suddenly some malady swoops down upon him : 
he dies, and his dust is stored away under the 
little church in which he meant to be a decent 
worshipper. Shall we follow the fortunes of the 
body with the eye of the imagination, hoping 
to find in any intimation what became of that, 
in certain gases, certain growths of vegetable 
and animal life, a sufficient conservation of the 
energy that could produce the mirth of Falstaff, 
the tenderness of Cordelia, the fascinating love- 
liness of Juliet, the graver charm of the much- 
suffering Desdemona, the doubt of Hamlet, and 
the awful tragedy of Lear? To think of such a 
thing is to confute it. But, if the conservation 
of energy be indeed a law, if it runs all the way 
through the world of matter and of spirit, the 
force which constituted Shakspere's soul must 
somehow be conserved. And for such conser- 
vation we cannot be put off with any immortality 
of fame, or influence, or affection, or social per- 
petuity. There is nowhere here any sufficient 
conservation of the energy that was still vital in 



152 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

the poet when disease and death arrived. All 
this had been provided for, and still the mighty 
intellect remained. And, in one form or another, 
it must remain unto this day; else is there no 
law of the conservation of energy. 

But the conservation of energy does not sig- 
nify its continuous identity. The energy is 
oftenest conserved by transmutation. The heat 
becomes motion or the motion heat. To our 
indefeasible negative ground of hope we have, 
then added only so much of a positive element 
as is suggestive of the persistency of the force 
embodied in our consciousness. But if this 
force should suffer such a transmutation as 
that of heat into motion, there would be no 
resumption of our conscious, individual life 
beyond the grave. Is there, then, any positive 
element suggestive of the continuous identity 
and self-consciousness of the individual soul? 
There is; and it inheres in the perception 
of the fact that in man, the highest product 
of natural selection, begins a process of vol- 
untary selection, of conscious self-improvement, 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 153 

,and of conscious devotion to the progressive 
tendency of the universal order. Can you 
conceive that when the eternal Power has, as 
the last result of millions of years of patient 
evolution, fashioned a being, who can echo 
his own wonderful I AM, who can be a con- 
scious fellow-laborer with him in carrying on 
the sweep of evolution to still grander heights, 
he should be so unthrifty as to resolve this 
being back again into unconsciousness? The 
words are anthropomorphic, but the thought is 
not necessarily so. I am reminded of those 
wonderful words of the apostle, " The earnest 
expectation of the creation longeth for the mani- 
'festation of the sons of God." Good science 
that ! Good evolution ! And when this mani- 
festation has at length been consummated, I dare 
believe th.at Nature will somehow secure her 
work, henceforth her conscious workman, against 
any loss of that which is the crown of her re- 
joicing. " The mighty energy that is enwrapped 
" in the human will, the indomitable sense of 
" duty that tramples down tempting pleasures, 



154 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

" and impels man to conflict and self-sacrifice 
" for the right, the wealth of love that he lavishes 
" and that no limit of years exhausts, the un- 
" satisfied spirit within him, for ever peering 
" over the barriers of knowledge in search of 
" new realms of truth : — as these testify to a 
" past eternity which has been used in producing 
" them, so do they point forward to a future 
" eternity, which they are to use as conscious 
u creative forces in the universe of God." 1 

Another positive element in support and 
confirmation of our indefeasible hope inheres 
in the concomitance of such a hope with all that 
is most beautiful and noble in our intellectual 
and moral life. For in the natural order of 
events I hold that nothing is more certain than 
that the hope of immortality is organized in us 
more definitely by every higher thought, or 
nobler act, or purer purpose of our lives. It is 
not as if we went about deliberately to make 
our hope more eager, but it is made more eager 
in the natural order of our lives, just in pro- 

1 Rev. William J. Potter. 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY, 1 55 

portion as we seek great ends, live for the im- 
perishable things of truth and righteousness. 
Can it be possible that there is such a contra- 
diction at the inmost heart of things, that every 
higher thought, or nobler act, or purer purpose, 
tends to immerse us deeper in a terrible illusion? 
Are not a thousand and ten thousand voices of 
science blending to assert the solidarity of 
universal nature and life? Can there be con- 
tradiction and confusion only here where life 
reaches its highest level, or must there be some 
" pre-established harmony 5 ' between our hope 
and some sublime reality? If the almost in- 
variable concomitant of the noblest living is 
this glorious hope, then unless Nature is divided 
against herself, does not this almost invariable 
concomitance suggest with overwhelming seri- 
ousness that the same power which organizes 
in us the purest splendors of our thought and 
love organizes in us the hope of an immortal 
life, in which these splendors shall go on and 
on from glory to glory. Here is an element 
so positive in confirmation of our hope that at 



156 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

times it seems to me to have the force of scien- 
tific demonstration. 

But let us keep clearly within bounds. " No 
demonstration, but a hope," says Dr. Bartol. It 
is best so. It must be if God is good, or, as 
the agnostic might prefer to phrase it, if the 
universe is sane. If demonstration had been 
best, then demonstration would have been the 
order of the day. " No demonstration, but a 
hope." But once sure of our hope, once sure 
that it is indefeasible, as we can be negatively 
from the total inability of science to express our 
consciousness in physical terms, and positively, 
because all force is indestructible, because nat- 
ural selection becomes voluntary in us, and 
because this hope is the almost invariable con- 
comitant of our highest spiritual life, — once sure 
of our hope and we can leave it free to be ex- 
panded, purified, ennobled by all our various 
intellectual and moral and affectional life. The 
more wonderful the realization of this hope 
appears to us, the more reasonable will it appear 
at the same time ; such being the average make 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 57 

of things, that the more wonderful any thing is, 
so it be truly wonderful, the more likely is it to 
be true. We need not go about to nurse the 
fibre of our hope with wilful energy. We have 
only to live a rich and full and loving and har- 
monious life, and every stream from every 
height will swell this rushing river, and fertilize 
its banks with tenderer and more fragrant 
flowers. Reading great books, hearing great 
music, seeing great pictures, it will seem quite 
impossible to us that the creators of these things 
should not outlast their works. But these 
achieve a sort of immortality, as members of 
" the choir invisible, whose music is the glad- 
ness of the world." Shakspere and Homer are 
more alive and regnant now than when they 
were in the body, thanks to their literary monu- 
ments. But you and I have known men and 
women, the latchets of whose sandals Homer 
and Shakspere were not worthy to unloose: 
they were so pure and true. They leave behind 
them neither books nor paintings, but none the 
less our hope of immortality is nourished at 
the stainless fount of their immeasurable con- 



158 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

secration. We cannot make them dead. We 
stand beside their silent forms and look upon 
their faces. How like our friends, and yet how 
infinitely different ! Where is that " mysterious 
companion " whose absence makes this infinite 
difference? We cannot say, but standing there, 
our hope that somehow, somewhere, it survives, 
a conscious individual life, receives immense 
acceleration. I say not that at such times I am 
certain of immortality. But what I say is, that 
at such times I feel as certain of it as of my own 
existence. I have known men and women whose 
real death was an unthinkable proposition; as 
much so as a square circle or the meeting of 
two parallel lines. Might not our own be so to 
us, if we should live the truest and divinest life 
we know? 

Doubtless to some of you the hope for which 
I plead will seem a thin and colorless abstrac- 
tion. But so that you do not forget that you 
are hoping, not affirming, you can fill out my 
meagre outline as completely as you choose, 
and your hope will have the same validity that 
any imaginative presentation of the other world 



CONCERNING IMMORTALITY. 1 59 

has ever had. For every such presentation has 
been without authority. Shall we meet our 
friends? Shall we know them? Shall we be 
with them? Religious sentiment has answered 
all these questions according to our heart's 
desire. But the answers are without any war- 
rant of the Bible or the creeds. Not a syllable 
did Jesus lisp concerning any of these things. 
Only remember that you are hoping, not 
affirming, and you may hope as bravely as you 
like ; ay, even as I do, that 

" sudden the worst turns the best to the brave ; 

The black minute's at end, 
And the elements' rage, and the voices that rave, 

Shall dwindle, shall blend, 
Shall change, shall become first a peace, then a joy, 

Then a light, then thy breast, 
O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again, 

And with God be the rest ! " 

And yet I would that all of us might hold 
our hope of immortality in strict subordination 
to our faith in the eternal Power who worketh 
all things well. The ideal attitude is reached 
when we can say in our Gethsemanes of lone- 
liness and grief, when we have hoped our hope 



l6o THE FAITH OF REASON. 



of immortality with the utmost tenderness and 
passion of our souls, " Nevertheless not as I 
will, but as Thou wilt." Our relation to the 
idea of immortality reaches its highest form, 
its purest possible religiousness, when it arrives 
at this. This is the supreme self-sacrifice. 
The depth of our desire measures the height 
of our self-abnegation. Well may 'our barks 
sink, if to this deeper sea ! When, hope as you 
will, you can trust every thing to the Eternal, 
then does the peace that passes understanding 
overflow your heart with its ineffable serenity. 
And can you not trust every thing to him when 
you consider all the ordered beauty and benefi- 
cence of his manifest life? Hope then, dear 
friends, as grandly as you will, but still more 
grandly trust. 

" We men, who in our morn of youth defied 
The elements, must vanish. Be it so ! 
Enough if something from our hands have power 
To live and act and serve the future hour ; 
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, 
Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, 
We feel that we are greater than we know?'* 

January 26, 1879. 



V. 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 
HETHER the function of prayer is an 



obsolete superstition, or still adequate 
in one form or another to the demands of sci- 
entific truth and rational religion, is a question 
of such serious and almost painful import that 
one does not approach it without hesitation and 
anxiety, lest he should think or speak of it mis- 
leadingly. But it is a question which is en- 
grossing so largely the attention of the more 
thoughtful part of every civilized community, 
that the teacher of religion is hardly permitted 
to excuse himself from speaking of it to his 
habitual congregation in such fashion as he 
may. Meantime the great majority of religious 
people, Christian and others, are not afflicted 
with any doubt or hesitation in regard to this 
important matter. A perfect confidence in the 




1 62 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

efficacy of prayer is the prevailing mood; and 
between objects for which it is admissible to 
pray and objects for which it is^iot, the average 
mind makes no distinction. Material commodi- 
ties and spiritual benefits jostle each other in 
the petitions of the devout believer ; the former 
coming in for their full share of urgency, es- 
pecially if we reckon under this head, as in 
strict propriety we should, the comforts and 
felicities of a prospective state of being. And 
if the ultimate test of any form of creed or con- 
duct is the warrant of antiquity, and particularly 
of that segment of antiquity which is reported 
in the Jewish and early Christian scriptures 
included in the Bible, then it must be confessed 
that all the argument is on the side not only of 
prayer, but of prayer in every possible form, for 
every conceivable object. There is no selfish- 
ness or crudity or indelicacy or mechanism or 
audacity of modern prayer which cannot find 
some prototype in the most ancient times, in 
the Bible or out of it, and in the theory and 
practice of the most conspicuous teachers of 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 163 

religion. The earliest prayers of which we have 
any knowledge are frank requests for grain and 
cattle, for a numerous progeny, — now seldom 
prayed for or desired, — for success in war and 
rapine, for defence against disease and poverty 
and death. Oftenest the prayer was a propitia- 
tion of a malicious or offended deity, or an 
attempt to bribe one deity to interfere and 
thwart the malevolent intentions of another. 
In Homer and Virgil, the suppliants are on the 
alert to get the strongest god upon their side. 
To this end, they coax him and flatter him, 
appeal to his pride, threaten him, and so on. 
In the same way, the gods pray to each other. 
We see Jupiter and his ox-eyed Juno arrayed 
on different sides, haggling with and plotting 
against each other. Where, as among the 
Hebrews, polytheism had a tribal root, there 
was the same endeavor to engage the help of 
the most potent deity. And Jacob vowed a 
vow saying, " If Jehovah will be with me and 
will keep me in this way that I go, and will give 
me bread to eat and raiment to put on, then 



164 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

shall Jehovah be my God." The spirit here 
evinced is that of the free and independent 
voter determined to cast his vote for that can- 
didate who will pay the most for it. The 
worshipper is resolved to put his prayer, as 
the congressman his money, where it will do 
the most good. We find Moses saying to Je- 
hovah substantially, " Shame on you ! what will 
the gods of the other nations and their retainers 
think of you, if you do thus and so?" There 
was once a New England farmer who affirmed 
that he had prayed in the corner of every lot 
upon his many-acred farm, — prayed that the 
'Lord would punish his enemies. A great many 
of the Old Testament prayers are of this sort. 
The psalms especially abound in them. " Eli^s 
prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it 
did not rain for the space of three years and six 
months." The prayer of Elijah brought down 
fire from heaven to burn wood and to lick up 
water. In the New Testament it is written, 
" All things whatsoever ye ask in prayer, be- 
lieving, ye shall receive.' ' That is very com- 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 65 

prehensive. Of course the word " believing " 
furnishes a convenient loop-hole for the modern 
pietist to back out of. When the prayer is not 
answered, we are assured it is because of un- 
belief. So with James's assertion, " The prayer 
of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall 
raise him up." Within a few years, there have 
been legal proceedings against a sect in Eng- 
land called the Peculiar People, who practised 
this method as a substitute for medical treat- 
ment* Again, it is promised in the New Testa- 
ment, " If two of you shall agree on earth, as 
touching any thing they shall ask, it shall be 
done for them by my father who is in heaven. " 
Hence the concentric fire of prayers at stated 
seasons. Hence the suggestion, a few years 
ago, that all the churches should pray for the 
appearance of a fiery cross in heaven on a cer- 
tain night, in attestation of the truth of certain 
dogmas of religion. The longer-headed has- 
tened to prevent such an arrangement. But the 
logic of the situation entirely justified it. Prayer 
and the dogma being what men claim, the deity 



1 66 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

would have been in honor bound to make the 
cruciform display. Once more, we have in the 
New Testament the parable of the unjust judge, 
who, though he would not hear the woman 
because of the justice of her cause, did finally 
hear her " because of her importunity/' Here 
is the Biblical excuse for the persistent praying 
of the modern pietist, for the idea that God can 
be tired out and compelled to give in if the 
petitioner does not give out. 

Said I not truly, then, that if the ultimate test 
of any form of creed or conduct is the warrant 
of antiquity, and particularly the warrant of the 
Bible, there is no boldness or crudity or mech- 
anism or audacity of modern prayer that can- 
not find this warrant? Let us say it frankly: 
The man who does not go behind the Bible, who 
does not feel at liberty to question any state- 
ment it contains, to whom it is the final court 
of appeal, who regards its every verse and 
chapter as the direct inspiration of the Al- 
mighty, — such a man is perfectly consistent in 
praying for any temporal commodity, for the 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 



167 



suspension of any physical law, in arranging 
such a concentric fire against the stony heart of 
God as shall break down its walls of adamant, 
and enable the besieging army to rush in and 
rifle all the treasure of its love, and drench itself 
with all the wine of its dear pity. Such a man 
has not only Bible warrant for these modes of 
prayer, he has the warrant of the universal 
Christian tradition. Montalembert, a most learned 
and pious Roman Catholic, says that prayer is 
stronger than omnipotence. It can compel 
God. He cannot resist the entreaties of his 
saints. There is a remarkable passage in the 
writings of Martin Luther, in which his prayers 
and their successful outcome are described in 
the terms of a tremendous physical encounter, 
in which, having got uppermost, he, Luther, 
pummels his antagonist until he cries for mercy, 
and promises to concede every thing that is 
asked for. Of late, the air has rung with blas- 
phemies ; but no approach has yet been made to 
this appalling illustration of the invincibility of 
prayer. 



1 68 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

But it will be allowed, at least by all Protes- 
tants, that, were the Bible warrant wanting, these 
later manifestations would not be of much ac- 
count. The Bible warrant is the stronghold of 
the popular philosophy of prayer. If we cannot 
go behind the Bible, if there is no higher court 
of reason to which we may appeal from its posi- 
tions, if it is proper to regard it as literally and 
infallibly the word of God, — then is the popular 
philosophy of prayer worthy of all acceptance 
and of the freest application. 

But these ifs are tremendous. You all know 
very well that the Bible has a natural history, 
and that this natural history is such as to bring 
every doctrine it contains to the bar of reason 
and discredit it if a verdict of " not true " is 
rendered there. It is no longer permissible for 
any intelligent person to engage in any line of 
conduct or belief simply and only because it 
has Biblical warrant, seeing that for the most 
part we are ignorant as to when the different 
parts of the Bible were written, and by whom 
they were written. Manifestly, it is a gratuitous 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 169 

« 

stultification of one's self to accord to writings 
of this description any other authority than they 
possess in virtue of their intrinsic rationality. 
For the same reason, we should let no reverence 
for the personal character of Jesus, or zeal for 
his infallibility, affect our judgment of beliefs 
that bear his superscription in the record, see- 
ing that there is not a sentence in the Bible of 
which we can be absolutely sure that Jesus 
uttered it. Paint the result of criticism an inch 
thick with subterfuges, and to this favor it must 
come. 

The question then arises, to be answered 
upon purely rational grounds, What functions 
of prayer, if any, are still valid? It is of no use 
to say that this fruit of prayer is so fine that it 
disdains the handling of argument, that by such 
handling all its delicate bloom is worn away and 
all its beauty marred. The question has been 
forced upon us by the development of scientific 
thought. It is of no use to pretend indiffer- 
ence. We cannot feel it. " He that doubteth 
is damned, if he eat!' 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



" The doubt that saps the life 
Is doubt half-crushed, half-veiled ; the lip-assent 
Which finds no echo in the heart of hearts." 

But, first of all, I must insist that the validity 
of prayer is not involved in the validity of the 
popular conception of the nature of prayer. If 
it were, there would be no more praying possi- 
ble for me. For the popular conception of prayer, 
the average theological conception, involves a 
miracle in every answered prayer. Prayer thus 
conceived is the human side of special provi- 
dence. In every instance of successful prayer, 
the deity is supposed to interfere with, to sus- 
pend, the orderly procedure of the universe. 
The rational religionist contends that no suffi- 
cient evidence has yet been produced of any 
such suspension, of any such interference. The 
popular religionist, the conservative theologian, 
in dealing with this matter, habitually confounds 
the fact, sometimes indubitable, that prayers are 
answered with the inference that God interferes 
to answer them. But that a prayer is answered, 
or, to speak more strictly, that the thing prayed 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 171 

for comes to pass, is no sufficient evidence that 
God has suspended the orderly procedure of 
the universe on our behalf. Let us suppose 
that there are instances where, if we could be 
certain that the thing which comes to pass 
would not have come to pass but for our prayer, 
to infer divine interference would be inevitable. 
Such instances are prayers involving a wide 
circle of phenomena, as, for example, prayers 
for rain, or for abundant harvests, or for immu- 
nity from storms at sea, or for the cessation of a 
pestilence. To be certain in such instances that 
prayer was answered — that is, that it had pro- 
duced the desired effect — would, let us suppose, 
be equivalent to a certainty that God had inter- 
posed to bring about the state of things desired. 
For though in some of these instances a certain 
reflex influence of prayer is possible, as in the 
matter of the harvest or the pestilence, it could 
not be to any great extent. The conditions of 
the problem would remain comparatively undis- 
turbed. In the case of rain or storms at sea, the 
possibility of reflex action is eliminated alto- 



1/2 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

gether. Here, then, absolute certainty that but 
for the prayer the thing desired would not have 
come to pass, would be, let us suppose, absolute 
certainty that God had interposed to answer it. 
But absolute certainty in a matter of this sort is 
something that can never be attained. Suppose 
it should not rain from now till next September, 
and that then one great concentric prayer for 
rain, rain, should go up from millions of parched 
lips, storming the ear of heaven with wildly 
passionate entreat} 7 , and even while the prayers 
were straining up, the blessed moisture should 
begin to fall upon the thirsty fields and the im- 
ploring hands of agonized devotion. If the rain 
came because of the prayer, we would allow that 
God had interposed to answer it. We would 
waive all consideration of " the chemico-vital 
forces set loose by an earnest prayer." We 
would give God the glpry. But how could we 
feel absolutely certain, even in such a case, that 
the blessing came in ansAver to the prayer ; that 
it might not have come if there had been no 
prayer at all? And if we could not feel certain 



If ' 

CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 73 

in such a case, what certainty is possible, when 
no instance is on record a thousandth part so 
crucial in its character as this? And so with 
every similar experiment. How be sure that 
the storm would have engulfed our loved ones 
but for our prayer, that " the iceberg moving 
slowly down into the path of traffic " would not 
have kept " her fatal appointment with the 
ship " if we had prayed more ardently, that the 
crop is bountiful or that the pestilence is stayed 
because of our entreaty? Because we can never 
be sure of these things, because there may be 
coincidence instead of cause and effect, we 
can never be sure of an interfering deity or in 
other words (those of Professor Tyndall) of " a 
disturbance of natural law quite as serious as 
the stoppage of an eclipse, or the rolling of the 
St. Lawrence up the falls of Niagara." 

The great majority of " answers to prayer " 
are of such a character that even if we allow 
their claim, — that the thing obtained would not 
have been but for the prayer, — it does not 
follow that there has been any suspension of the 



174 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

orderly procedure of the universe. We must 
not forget that the imagination is a potent 
factor in the human organism, and that the 
attitude of expectant attention has immense 
"subjective influence. We are hardly permitted 
to doubt that " king's-evil," or scrofula, was 
really affected by the king's touch, or that the 
bones of the saints have made rheumatic limbs 
more pliable. But was the virtue in the ob- 
jective touch or relic, or in the subjective 
imagination. A German savant discovered the 
long-venerated bones of a saint to be those 
of a donkey, but on this account they had not 
been a whit less remedial. " Any state of the 
body earnestly expected," says a learned physi- 
ologist, " is very likely to ensue. " There is a 
man in Belgium whose hands and feet bleed 
every Friday, as it were from nails driven into 
them. The priests say it is a miracle like unto 
the famous stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. 
A commission of medical men, appointed by the 
government, say it is the result of morbid ex- 
pectation, the whole energy of the victim's 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 75 

nature being directed to this end, so flattering 
to his ecclesiastical pretensions. But this prin- 
ciple of expectant attention is not now responsi- 
ble for as many answers to prayer as formerly. 
There are, however, two celebrated institutions in 
Germany where patients are treated for various 
mental and some bodily diseases by prayer, and 
it is said the cures are many. But as the pa- 
tients are also treated by fresh air and out-of- 
door life and pleasant scenery, and have much 
quiet and no medicine, it may be that the 
prayers are not the secret of recovery. " It is 
beyond all question or dispute," said Voltaire, 
" that magic words and ceremonies are quite 
capable of destroying a whole flock of sheep, 
if the words be accompanied by a sufficient 
quantity of arsenic." 

How many prayers are answered, too, because 
men over-hear them, not because God hears them. 
At any rate the over-hearing is sufficient to ac- 
count for the result. George Miiller's famous 
charity in England is, according to his represen- 
tations, which maybe perfectly sincere, supported 



Ij6 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

entirely by prayer. But by such an avowal, on 
his part, people who believe in prayer are put 
upon their honor not to let the institution lan- 
guish. It is prayer that is at stake, not merely 
the institution. If Miiller had kept his method 
a profound secret, his receipts might not have 
been so large, but the test of prayer-alone would 
have been more effectual. There is a consump- 
tives' home in Boston supported entirely by 
prayer. It has its contribution boxes in scores 
of public places, conspicuously labelled with the 
name and policy of the institution. When a 
people are wasted with famine, it is not even 
necessary to tfsw-hear their prayers for succor. 
It is sufficient for those who can help them to 
hear of the fact. This is a quite sufficient 
prayer to them, which they will answer speedily 
with ship-loads of food seasoned with the tears 
of a divine compassion. So, too, the need of 
cities wrapped in flames, or scourged by pesti- 
lence, need not be telegraphed to us by way of 
heaven. It can come direct. The god in us 
hears the afflicting story, and responds to it with 



CONCERNING PRAYER. IJJ 

needful sustenance. Oh, there is many a prayer 
that now goes all unanswered that would be 
answered speedily if but some man or woman 
could overhear it! But so many prayers are 
overheard that this element must never be 
omitted from the problem, Whether the orderly 
procedure of the universe is ever temporarily 
suspended in response to our entreaties. 

Volumes have been written, full of instances 
which are supposed to favor the affirmative 
solution of this problem, not one of which is 
verifiable, but no volume has so far been written, 
by the advocates of heavenly interference or 
by anybody else, enumerating the instances in 
which the prayer has never had the faintest 
semblance of an answer. The million volumes 
in the National Library at Paris would not be 
sufficient to contain such an enumeration. But 
is it fair that every instance favorable to the 
doctrine of interference should be counted and 
every other instance go for naught? I know 
the posterns by which men. escape from this 
dilemma. They say that the unanswered pray- 



178 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

ers were not ardent enough, or persistent enough, 
or something of that sort. But any one must 
be stone-blind not to perceive that here we 
have an arbitrary excuse for a foregone con- 
clusion. 

I must confess that there is something horri- 
ble to me in men's assurance that God has 
interfered to save their lives, their property, 
their friends, but has not interfered to save the 
lives, the property, the friends of other people. 
It was a special providence that they did not 
sail upon the missing steamer. What was it, 
then, for all who did sail, and came back no 
more? Might God have interfered to save 
that freight of precious lives, and did not, per- 
haps because the requisite amount of prayers 
was not forthcoming. No, no ! God does not 
interfere: the comfortable, the blessed thought 
is that he cannot interfere. He cannot or he 
would. I stake my faith in him on this asser- 
tion. He suffers no' restraint but that of his 
own infinite perfection. But, thanks to this, 
one shattered train, one sinking wreck offsets 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 79 

all the imaginary interferences that have ever 
been recorded, and remands them at once and 
for ever to the province of coincidence or over- 
hearing or exaggeration. Of what avail the 
baby-house suggestion, that God, anticipating 
human prayer, left certain openings in the net- 
work of his laws through which he can reach 
out handfuls of benefits and immunities, — winds 
out of some ^Eolian cave, or showers of needed 
rain, and quiet of the sea or of the heart? Law 
is an armor so compact that there is not a joint 
which any interfering touch can penetrate. In 
the material universe, there is not a space as big 
as a pin-head for an interfering god to stand 
upon. The ground is everywhere preoccupied 
by those persistent habits of the deity which we 
call laws, — habits which are not a second nature, 
as we say of ours, but his first and only nature, 
his essential quality. To pray for so much in- 
terference as would quell one coming storm, or 
squeeze one rain-drop out of a reluctant cloud, 
9 is to pray that the entire history of the universe 
up to date may be revised, and that God may 



i8o 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



change the essence of his nature with a view to 
our imaginary comfort or advantage. 

There are those who say, in answer to all this, 
that the so-called laws of nature are only our 
subjective formulas; that is to say only our 
classification of such facts as have already 
come within our ken. It does not follow that 
there are not other facts. No, it does not. But 
never was any attempt to find a foot-hold for the 
supernatural more unfortunate than this. If the 
laws of nature were not subjective classifications 
of the observed facts of nature, if they were so 
many unalterable formulas known to be inclu- 
sive of all natural facts, then any fact that did 
not come within their scope would at once 
declare itself supernatural. But what makes 
a miracle impossible, in the sense of a super- 
natural event, is that the laws of nature, as we 
call them, are subjective classifications of the 
observed facts of nature; and the moment we 
come upon a fact not included in them, we are 
simply obliged to modify our hitherto unduly 
narrow conception of the laws of nature, so that 



CONCERNING PRAYER. l8l 

they will include the latest fact. " The day-fly," 
says Professor Huxley, " has better grounds for 
calling a thunder-storm supernatural, than has 
man, with his experience of an infinitesimal 
fraction of duration, to say that the most as- 
tonishing event that can be imagined is beyond 
the scope of natural causes. " And thus the 
subjective character of the so-called laws of 
nature, so far from being a back-door through 
which the supernatural may find its way into 
"the house of life/' is a mountain-wall which it 
can never pass. Whatever happens, no matter 
how wonderful, no matter how unexampled, can 
only serve to broaden our subjective generaliza- 
tion of law. It cannot possibly transcend it. 

And hence it follows that we have been too 
ready to allow or to suppose that, if it could be 
proved that but for the prayer A the event B 
would not have happened, we should have a 
genuine case of interference. Prove that but 
for the prayer the drought would not have 
ceased, and what follows? That there has been 
an interference of the deity? Certainly not; 



1 82 THE FAITH OF REASON, 

but only that our formulas of natural law must 
be extended so as to include prayer, henceforth, 
among the data of meteorology, an additional 
element of uncertainty in all our weather 
calculations. 

Things being as they are, it is impossible to 
predicate an interfering deity at any point in 
the illimitable sweep of prayer, from the early 
Aryan's frank petition " that we may prosper in 
getting and keeping " to the most spiritual 
prayer a Robertson or Channing ever breathed. 
There are many people who do not demur at 
this result, so long as it is understood to cover 
only the material side of prayer, — petition for 
objective benefits, health, wealth, and safety, and 
so on, — who, nevertheless, are hurt and troubled, 
when it is proposed to extend the application to 
prayer for spiritual benefits, — for peace of mind, 
for strength of will, for purity of heart. Men 
pray for purer purposes, for better dispositions, 
for broader charity, for faithfulness to their 
ideals of truth and righteousness. That it must 
be ennobling and exalting to proffer such peti- 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 



tions no one is likely to deny. If we fall to work 
and help the deity to answer our petitions, the 
benefit accruing may be beyond all estimate. 
But if, refusing to deceive ourselves, we put the 
question squarely, Does God interfere to answer 
these petitions any more than those for health, 
or rain, or victory in battle? we are obliged to 
answer, He does not. For, in the first place, 
that reflex action which in prayers for material 
blessings is sometimes a very doubtful factor, is 
here an obvious and very potent energy. Such 
prayers avail not for ourselves alone, but for our 
friends. I have heard such, and as I listened 
to their words of tender pleading, all that was 
worst in me seemed suddenly to lose its power, 
all that was best to assert a calm superiority. 
How could I ever sin against those beautiful 
ideals of truth and holiness which in that mo- 
ment I had seen ! And I have gone for days 
in the strength of some such momentary reve- 
lation. But there was no need to assume any 
heavenly interference to account for my access 
of strength and peace. Is there ever any such 



1 84 THE FAITH OF REASON. 



need? If roughly, still is it not truly, said, " You 
will get a virtue no sooner than a salad for the 
asking." And if, just for the asking, or for any 
amount of asking, God does not make us more 
charitable or just or honest or sincere or pure 
or kind, ought we to keep on asking him to 
make us this or that, whatever incidental benefit 
accrues? We must not be liars in our devo- 
tions. We must not make a show of asking 
God for this or that, in order that we may econo- 
mize some reflex influence of our petition. 

No miracle, no prayer, insists the popular 
religionist. But it is just as impossible to prove 
a miracle in the sense of a suspension of the 
ordinary course of nature on the spiritual as on 
the material plane. Prove that the spiritual 
blessing would not have come without the 
prayer, and you have proved a relation of co- 
existence or sequence, of cause and effect; but 
you have proved no interference. It never can 
be proved. Establish any fact, and immediately 
Nature adopts it into her universal order, 

" And gives to it an equal date 
With Andes or with Ararat." 



• CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 85 

How then? Seeing that no supernatural in- 
terference ever has been or ever can be proved, 
on the material or on the spiritual plane, shall 
we deny in toto the legitimacy of any and of 
every prayer? Yes, if we accept the would-be 
axiom of popular religion, — No miracle, no 
prayer. No, if we do not accept this would-be 
axiom. And we do not accept it. We deny all 
miracle, all interference, and at the same time 
we affirm the legitimacy and dignity and glory 
and sufficiency of prayer. 

But then we do .this because we do not define 
prayer by the inferior limit. * If you insist that 
prayer shall be defined by the inferior limit, 
that it shall be begging for favors or immunities 
or miraculous benefits and nothing else, then, 
verily, for you there is no legitimate, no rational 
prayer. But, taken all the ages down, prayer 
has a million times been something over and 
above all this. Thousands of prayers which 
have contained this element of selfishness, 
this beggar cry, this plea for miracle, have 
contained something else, and something very 



1 86 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

different. Those of you who have ever studied 
the development of prayer from the stand- 
point of evolution know that our modern prayer 
is the lineal descendant of ancient sacrifice. 
Hosea, the prophet, indicates the point of tran- 
sition, when he calls the spoken praise of fjod 
" the calves (that is, the sacrificial calves) of the 
lips." The psalms of the Old Testament rep- 
resent prayer in its first remove from sacrifice. 
And they are not so much an asking as a giving. 
So with the sacrifices that preceded them and 
kept them company. There were thank-offer- 
ings as well as peace-offerings among them. 
Go back still further, back to the genesis of 
prayer, to its pre-natal condition. The earliest 
form of prayer (or rather of its anticipatory 
phenomena) was the offering of food to the 
ancestral ghosts. " Come to your home ! " 
chaunted the mourners. " It is swept for you 
and clean; and we are there who loved you 
ever. And there is rice put for you and water ; 
come home, come home, come to us again ! " 
In this pre-natal germ of prayer, there is a hint 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 



18/ 



of its sublimest possibility. There is a rebuke 
of those who insist that if it is not beggary it 
is nothing. In this pre-natal germ, it was no 
asking, but a giving. And it is still no asking, 
but a giving, at its highest point of evolution; 
a giving certainly, and if an asking, such an 
asking as implies no interference of the deity 
with the orderly procedure of the universe. 

Prayer is a gift of man to the Eternal. A gift 
of awe and wonder, reverence, adoration. This 
is a gift which is appropriate at all times and 
in all places where it is natural and spontaneous. 
" That perfect disenthralment which is God " 
eludes the trap deliberately set for it, but through 
" the soul's east window of divine surprise " 
flies in without an invitation. 

" No man can think, nor in himself perceive, 
Sometimes at waking, in the street sometimes, 
Or on the hill-side, always unforewarned, 
A grace of being finer than himself 
That beckons and is gone, a larger life 
Upon his own impinging," — 

no man can have such an experience as this, 
— and soon or late it comes to each and 



1 88 THE FAITH OF REASON. 



all, — without bringing his gift to the altar; 
without that thrill of awe, of reverence, of 
adoration, Avhich is more truly prayer than 
thousands of petitions which are proffered in 
the conventional postures of devotion. And I 
would have you note, that science, which is the 
inveterate negation of all prayer that looks for 
heavenly interference, is to the prayer of adora- 
tion a freshet that inundates all its banks with 
new occasions for its joy. With Lockyer and Dar- 
win and Lyell, we cannot think God's thoughts 
after him, and not rejoice in the eternal order, 
as men never could in some imaginary rent in 
its resplendent folds. The prayer which looks 
for interference in the eternal order is an im- 
putation of defect. What is this wonderful 
universe which we inhabit but, as it were, a 
mighty symphony, into whose melodies and 
harmonies the Infinite Being has put his whole 
self, all there is of him ; every part, every atom, 
every law is drenched with deity, — so full of 
him that not another particle can be obtruded ? 
The prayer that looks for interference is a 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 89 

prayer for more of God. A universe brimful of 
him is not enough. Dissipate this pitiful illusion, 
and every particle that is lost upon the side of 
interference is saved upon the side of that 
exquisite rapture which " accepts the universe " 
as an unspeakable good. No longer seeking 
for benefits or immunities from beyond the 
circle of the immutable law, it finds this law it- 
self instinct with deity, — better than any possible 
immunity, of all benefits the best. To see, to 
accept, to glory in the method and result of 
universal law, — this is the gift of man's adoring 
heart to the Eternal. When prayer arrives at 
such an altitude as this, its words are generally 
few. When prayer is at its best, it cannot find 
a voice. 

" I also am a child, and I 

Am ignorant and weak ; 
I look upon the starry sky, 

And then I must not speak. 
For all behind the starry sky, 

Behind the world so broad, 
Behind men's hearts and souls doth lie 

The Infinite of God." 



190 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



There is a power not ourselves which makes 
for order and beauty, as well as a power not 
ourselves that makes for righteousness. The 
hearts of those old Hebrew men thrilled at the 
touch of both. What men's have not in any 
age or land since man emerged from his 
primeval brutishness ! There is no danger that 
the prayer of adoration will ever flicker and go 
out upon the altar of devotion. The world 
might be just as wonderful, just as beautiful as 
it is, and, if man's mind were different, it might 
stir in him no sense of mystery, it might awaken 
in him no delight, no transport of enthusiasm, 
no rapture of thanksgiving. But so long as 
the world and humanity remain as they are, 
made for each other, the mind of man, the 
natural and genetic complement of the material 
universe, so long will there be that response 
of the human spirit to the divine which is of 
the finest essence of prayer. Certainly, the 
depth and earnestness of the response is largely 
proportioned to our thoughtfulness ; but, in a 
universe that is full of visions and of voices, 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 19 1 

few can so blind or deafen themselves as not 
to catch some beauty of the one, some music 
of the other. When the spring comes, as it 
will so soon, working its blessed transformation, 
when all the stars in heaven seem out together, 
when the moon is so white and large that all 
the stars are dim, when children are born into 
your homes, when the ineffable mysteries of 
thought and love entrance your mind and heart, 
at all such times, and at other times innumer- 
able, we pray as naturally as we breathe. Our 
prayer is no task-work, but the spontaneous, 
irrepressible, Godward movement of our hearts, 
their tidal swell obedient to an infinite attractive 
power. 

Should anybody ask me what is the use of 
praying in this way, I might find it very difficult 
to answer them. But that would not be my 
fault so much as theirs. If a man asks me 
why he should enjoy the vision of the moun- 
tains or the sea, how can I answer him? or if 
he asks me what is the use of enjoying these 
things? As with the parts, so also with the 



IQ2 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

whole. In one sense, there is no use of feeling 
that rapture in the presence of the All which 
is the essence of our adoration. Nobody is 
any richer for it in gold or land. It pays no 
dividends. Only the man who kindles with 
this rapture is infinitely more of a man than 
one who does not. And what is the use of 
ever putting this rapture into words, of express- 
ing it, or trying to express it, though we never 
can, in hymns and spoken prayers? This also 
pays no dividends. But then no more does 
lovers' happy talk. It is just telling, each the 
other, over and over again, that which is known 
already. It is no use, and yet those who, 
grown to manhood and womanhood, have not 
done something in this line at one time or 
another are greatly to be pitied. " I am a 
man," said Terence, " and nothing human is 
indifferent to me," In the best sense of the 
word, that is the most useful which helps me 
to be most a man, to bring my experience level 
with my highest possibility of quickened and 
multiplied consciousness of life's various good. 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 



193 



And in this sense the glow of adoration, and 
the poor stammering words in which it tries to 
body itself forth in hymn or prayer, are second 
to no other thing in point of use. 

To the function of adoration let us add the 
function of thanksgiving. If this could live 
upon no other food than the sense of a pe- 
culiar and exclusive care for us by the Omnipo- 
tent Power, then it might well hunger so for 
lack of meat as to exhale into the merest ghost 
of a dead dogma. 

" Yes, for me, for me He careth," 

we may still sing, but not as imagining that 
he is any respecter of persons, that he has any 
chosen people, any favored child, in all his 
spacious world. What we are thankful for is, 
that we are sharers of the universal joy and 
sorrow of the world. What we are thankful 
for is, that for all our sorrow and our burden 
others may be glad and free. The thankful- 
ness of rational prayer does not inhere in any 
particular blessings, but in the general make 



194 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



and the great sweep of things, the laws so 
stern and so inflexible, obedience to which can 
bring to us such peace and joy. When we 
think of the beauty of the world, of the work 
we have to do, of our friendships and our 
homes, of our thought and the great thinkers 
who assist it, and of the yearnings and the 
satisfactions of the moral life, and then of how 
this little life of ours is only one of many 
millions which the great central life upholds 
and cherishes, though we may not " pray reg- 
ular," any oftener than poor Job Leigh in 
" Mary Barton," yet we shall catch ourselves 
like him speaking a word with God, and thank- 
ing him at odd hours, simply because we cannot 
help it, any more than Job could when he had had 
" a fine day for an out." But words are not 
the only means of self-expression. Murder 
will out, and so will thankfulness. Sometimes 
it makes us literally leap for joy. Sometimes its 
omen is a sudden rush of tears. Sometimes 
it makes our wives and children wonder what 
has happened to us that we are so unusually 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 1 95 

considerate and kind. Sometimes it overflows 
in little acts of kindness to people we have 
never seen before and may never see again. 
To bow^ the head, to bend the knees, is not a 
necessary sign of thankfulness. " His port is 
erect, his face towards heaven," is a more apt 
description of the man whose heart is full of 
gratitude to God. No importunity, no prayer? 
There is a tribe of South Americans who know 
better than this. They believe their gods are 
so beneficent that they need ask them for 
nothing. Nevertheless, they try to express 
their gratitude to them by simple offerings. 
As we are of their simple faith, shall we not 
make their simple habit also ours? 

Another function of this rational, non-mirac- 
ulous prayer, which we are endeavoring to 
understand aright, is aspiration ; which is not 
asking to be made better by any stroke of 
heavenly interference, but striving to make 
ourselves better by the slow and patient culture 
of our every gift. It is the worship of ideal 
excellence. It declares itself in every effort 



196 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

to secure a body free from weakness or defect, 
ruddy with health, alive in every sense to its 
appropriate impressions ; in every effort to en- 
large the mind with fuller measures of the 
truth; in every practical resolve to make the 
reign of conscience more intelligent, and our 
obedience to its mandates more complete. I 
would not underrate the value of the faintest 
impulse in the direction of a purer or a better 
life. But the aspiration which is equivalent to 
the highest possible capacity of rational prayer 
must not be confounded with any such impulse, 
with any momentary wish that we might live 
more nearly level with our highest possible 
attainment. Welcome the mountain height 
or forest depth, the face of man or woman, 
the poet's thought or mystery of science, that 
for one moment gives to our horizon infinite 
expansion ! But there is a function of prayer 
which is more than any thrill of gladness, any 
rapture of thanksgiving, any momentary im- 
pulse of the heart towards what is purest, truest, 
best. And what is more, unless the worship 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 



197 



that is all of these goes forth to seek embodi- 
ment in voluntary act, in habitual life, it cannot 
be expected often to return and animate our dust. 
Gladness and thanks and trust and adoration 
are not for idlers, but for men who work. And 
so the definition of worship as " divine service/' 
familiar to you all, disappears upon one side 
only to reappear upon the other. The singing 
of hymns, the reading of a liturgy, the burning 
of incense, the making of genuflections, the 
wearing of one ecclesiastical over-garment rather 
than another, — there is no divine service in all 
this, no service of God, unless there is some 
help for man. Prayer is a life, says Zoroaster ; 
a persistent habit of the soul. And we must 
not be satisfied with any lower definition. Our 
aspiration must not be fitful and inconstant, 
here and there in some better moment a feeble 
wish, a make-believe resolve, so flattering to 
our moral consciousness. Such aspiration is 
of small account. 

But when aspiration is a constant and un- 
wearied habit of the soul; when year in and 



198 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



year out, we seek for the harmonious perfection 
of our bodies, minds, and hearts, — then doth the 
Eternal give to his beloved while they sleep : 
below the deep of consciousness streams into 
us the divine power. You have heard of the 
Thibetan praying-machine, a cylinder on which 
a famous prayer is pasted, kept revolving in a 
stream of running water. Hardly less mechani- 
cal, I think, are some of the devices of the 
modern Christian pietist. " Pray for these 
thirty-five," said the evangelist to a subordinate, 
on the morning of my visit to his meeting, and 
Dr. Deems informs us that one day he prays for 
all his friends whose names begin with A ; the 
next day for all whose names begin with B ; and 
so on through the alphabet. But the Thibetan 
praying-machine suggests not only the false 
mechanism of our Christian praying, but also 
the highest possibility of the most rational 
prayer that can be offered, for this is realized 
when the wonderful mechanism of this total 
life of ours, set in the rushing stream of time 
and circumstance, the awful current of events, 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 



199 



revolving there with marvellous rapidity, be- 
comes itself a prayer inclusive of all others 
that are worth the making. " The spirit of the 
living creature is in the midst of the wheels. " 
A prayer is written upon every tissue of the 
body, upon every fibre of the brain, upon every 
drop of red arterial blood, upon every thought 
and feeling and desire ; and the answer of this 
prayer of prayers is the response of the total 
sanity of the universe to the sanity of our total 
organism. " Continuing instant in prayer," this 
is what every true man of us is doing. " Pray 
without ceasing/' this is an injunction which a 
sound mind in a sound body must perforce 
obey. Truly there is a God who answers such 
a prayer as this persistent aspiration, this claim 
upon the universe of our continuous and total 
life. But his answer comes to us along no path 
of interference, but along the grooves of the 
eternal laws, and so comes very quickly. In 
town and field, he waits for us in every atom 
and event, and with rarer gifts than we could 
ask for, or could even think, responds to our 
fidelity. 



200 



the faith of ffasc:.: 



I know that there are some of you to whom 
the most of what I have said thus far, appears 
quite reasonable and true; but you conceive 
there is some incongruity between a theory of 
prayer so transcendental as this of mine, and 
almost any possible form of public or of private 
prayer. And certainly I have no disposition 
to deny that between such prayer as I have 
been trying to indicate and the majority of 
spoken prayers, public or private, there is a 
decided incongruity. I will go further, and will 
say that there is an incongruity between such 
prayer and every possible form. But then 
it is the incongruity which always has existed, 
and always will exist, between the spirit and 
the letter, the actual and the ideal. It is the 
incongruity which exists between the artist's 
conception and his w 7 ork. Think you that 
Michael Angelo ever embodied to the full, in 
any painting or sculpture, the vision to which 
he was not disobedient? But how much poorer 
the world of art would be if he had withheld 
his hand entirely because he could not, and 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 



201 



knew he could not, embody his conception to 
the full ! And how much poorer the world of 
religion would be if men had never tried to 
embody in the forms of worship their ideal 
religiousness ! Sometimes, no doubt, the words 
of prayer shame the reality. But when prayer 
is at its best, then any words that we can utter, 
or that the genius of prayer has ever framed, 
seem all inadequate. The reality of prayer 
does not necessitate the regularity of private 
speech with God. I must confess that for 
myself such regularity of speech or silence is 
barren of all good. But I do not infer that it 
is so with all. Let each be his own judge. If 
the regularity always, or in the majority of in- 
stances, brings with it the appropriate emotion, 
then for you such regularity is best. But others 
may be no less prayerful whose prayers are 
spoken, not at noon or eve, but whenever the 
strong impulse comes upon them. The words 
are not the prayer. The fewer these, I some- 
times think, the better. The saying is that 
when a god would ride, any thing serves him 



202 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



for a chariot. So when a genuine prayer of 
adoration, gratitude, and trust would speed to 
heaven, a single word may bear it up and on. 

" Feeling is all in all ; words are but sound and smoke, 
Veiling the glow of heaven." 

Happy the man who is so sure of this that he 
can often make his childhood's earliest prayer 
the vehicle of his maturest aspiration ! Happier 
if the old words bring back to him his mother's 
face, his mother's arms, so that, world-worn and 
weary, for a moment he may know how sweet 
it is, 

" To lie within the light of God, like a babe upon the breast, 
Where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are 
at rest." 

But some of you to whom it seems legitimate 
for private prayer to clothe itself in words, at 
regular or irregular intervals, consider public 
prayer a very doubtful matter. The individual 
in the secrecy of his chamber and his heart 
need not be choice of words. He may deter- 
mine once for all that they are all symbolical ; 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 



203 



that they are not scientific, but poetical. And 
after that, if they do not agree with his ration- 
alized philosophy of prayer, no one is deceived. 

He does not pray because he would ; 

He prays because he must, 
There is no meaning in his prayer, 

But thankfulness and trust. 

But it is different, men say, with public prayer. 
Yes, it is different. The public prayer is over- 
heard, and so the symbol must be chosen with 
much greater care. But it can hardly be chosen 
so carefully but that it will still be a symbol, 
not an exact expression ; and therefore the first 
necessity of all public prayer is that the con- 
gregation understand that it is a symbol, not 
an exact expression. Its language is not sci- 
entific, but poetic. Let this be understood, and 
henceforth all criticism of particular words and 
phrases is beside the mark; though certainly 
the congregation have good reason to expect that 
there shall be some general conformity between 
the language of devotion and their minister's 
avowed philosophy. 



204 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



Once rightly understood, it seems to me that 
public prayer is wholly natural and beautiful 
in its idea, whatever it may be in actual ex- 
perience. Sometimes it is no doubt 

" That drony vacuum of compulsory prayer, 
Still pumping phrases for the ineffable, 
Though all the valves of memory gasp and wheeze." 

But Theodore Parker said that never did he 
stand before his congregation in the attitude 
of prayer, however dull of heart he had been 
just before, but that suddenly he felt all the 
joys and sorrows of his people surging up 
through his heart and clamoring for expression 
at his lips. I doubt if those most sceptical of 
public prayer would not have made an excep- 
tion in favor of those idyls of devotion. But 
then they were exceptional. The " drony vac- 
uum" is the rule. Yes, but sometimes the 
channel, so often muddy when it is not wholly 
dry, receives such glorious access from all the 
heights of a man's nature, from all the hidden 
springs of his experience, that it is not deep 
enough or wide enough to hold the generous 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 20$ 

flood. Its banks are broken down and growths 
of character and endurance that were perishing 
of drought in other men feel a refreshing cool- 
ness at their roots, and throughout every part the 
promise and the potency of new and better life. 

It was said of Edward Everett that his 
prayers were the most eloquent ever addressed 
to a Boston audience. But if they were ad- 
dressed, not to the taste or fancy of his people, 
but to their conscience, to their justice, truth, 
and love, the sarcasm is not so very biting. Let 
us acknowledge frankly that, from one point 
of view, the public prayer is addressed to the 
assembled congregation. But none the less is 
it addressed to God. For it is not as if God 
were in some " hallowed part " of the wide 
universe. It is not as if he were not in you 
and me. -And as it is God who is addressed, 
so is it God who addresses. "As if God did 
beseech you," said St. Paul. Dr. Hedge writes 
me, there is but one party in prayer ; namely, 
God. This lofty mysticism is made good most 
obviously in public prayer, when what is best 
in me appeals to what is best in you. But is 



206 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



it not equally made good whenever we " sum- 
mon the good in the depths of ourselves " ? Nay 
in a world where God is all in all, must not all 
prayer be a divine soliloquy, the sacred converse 
of the Infinite Being with himself ? 

The objection to public prayer that it is 
prayer for others is well taken when it is this. 
To pray for others: this I must confess, until 
prayer passes over into action, seems to me 
quite impossible. But to pray with others, 
having first identified one's self with them, this 
is legitimate enough. Father Taylor was not 
much of a philosopher, but his rationale of 
public prayer was simply perfect when he said, 
" O God, we are a widow with six children ! " 
So, always, when the preacher truly prays, he 
is his congregation, the mouth-piece of their 
gladness and their sorrow, of their peace and 
pain. As much sympathy, so much true pub- 
lic prayer; no more. Given the sympathy, and 
it is no longer I that speak, but your spirit that 
speaketh in me. Then I am yonder mother, 
busy and anxious with her household cares. 
Then I am yonder father, troubled, like Martha, 



CONCERNING PRAYER. 



207 



about many things, and finding it so hard to 
keep from being fretful and impatient. Then 
I am yonder young man, or yonder " happiest 
girl in the world/' so busy with her thoughts of 
this and that, that she has not the least idea 
what I say; then I am those among you who 
are aging, and whose " finest hope is finest 
memory " projected into dim futurity. Then I 
am the sorrowing and bereft among you who 
are trying to take sides with God against your- 
selves, because you are so sure that your afflic- 
tions are but the shadows of his perfectness. 
Then I am those among you who are seeking 
that forgiveness for wrong-doing which is in- 
herent in the recuperative forces of the universe. 
This is the feeling although, it does not always 
find its way into the fittest words. And some- 
times when the feeling is strongest, the words 
will somehow altogether fail, and the minister 
will take the Lord's Prayer, 1 or a moment's 



1 The best of all symbols, because it is composed of 

" Words that have drunk transcendent meaning up 
From the best passion of all by-gone times." 



208 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



silence, and put all his feeling into that, at the 
risk, perhaps, of having others think he is not 
in a prayerful mood, when he was never in a 
deeper. 

But let us not take leave of one another in 
this outer court of our great theme. Let us 
return again, just for a moment, into its inner 
shrine, its holy of holies, where never any 
breath of aspiration, thankfulness, or trust, 
breaks up the silence, or stirs the veil which 
hangs before the secret place of the Most High ; 
where every wish and hope and aspiration is 
resolved into a voiceless peace, a trust ineffable. 

" Ask and receive : ' tis sweetly said, 

But what to ask for know I not, 
For wish is worsted, hope o'ersped, 

And aye to thanks returns my thought. 
If I would pray, I've nought to say 

But this, that God may be God still. 
For him to live is still to give, 

And sweeter than my wish his will." 

February 9, 1879. 



VL 



CONCERNING MORALS. 

/ *J^HE subject of my discourse was never 
more appropriate than at this moment, 
when so recently the soil of Massachusetts has 
been made more sacred than ever by receiving 
to itself all that could die of one who was, to a 
degree unparalleled in his day and generation, an 
incarnation of the Moral Sentiment. Breathing 
the name of Garrison, we pledge ourselves to 
the utmost seriousness of thought and speech. 
It was said of him in 1835 that he had " no 
visible auxiliary but a negro boy." But he had 
an invisible auxiliary, — the moral nature of 
man. Of that invisible auxiliary I am to speak 
to you this morning. 1 

1 These introductory sentences, though not a part of this 
discourse when it was first delivered, are retained, because the 
name of Garrison is of itself a moral inspiration. They were 
affixed when the discourse was read before the Free Religious 
Association, a few days after Mr. Garrison's death. 



2IO 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



Wherever human nature is, there is the Moral 
Sentiment. Can we as certainly affirm, Wher- 
ever human nature has been, there has been 
the Moral Sentiment also? I should say Yes, 
on any theory of human origins. Assuming 
man to be developed from some lower organism, 
the dawning of the Moral Sentiment would seem 
to be essential to the idea of human nature. 
Until this has arrived, the prospective man is 
something less than human. This is the fairy 
prince who wakes the sleeping beauty with the 
kiss so long delayed. If any choose to draw 
the line which separates humanity from the 
lower species below this point, they are at liberty 
to do so. The fact remains, that, wherever we 
now come in contact with beings whom we 
agree to call human, there is the Moral Senti- 
ment, there are the antithetic poles of right 
and wrong, there are the voices saying, Thou 
shall, and Thou shall not ; there are the words 
and attitudes of praise and blame. In different 
communities there is a difference in the objects 
which are regarded as praiseworthy or blame- 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



211 



worthy. The savage and barbarian feel morally- 
obliged to engage in certain actions that would 
be morally impossible for the civilized man, 
but everywhere appear the opposite poles, the 
antithetic ideas of right and wrong. This is 
the most salient feature of the life of man. 
Eliminate this feature, and you destroy the 
identity of human nature and of human history, 
They become something radically different. It 
is the part of Hamlet in the play, the theme 
which underlies the symphony, the Niobe who 
unifies the group, the voice of the chief singer 
in the choir. Modern critics and devotees of 
beauty are not wanting who insist that art must 
never moralize, and that it is wholly independent 
of morality. And, no doubt, there has been 
great art devoid of any moral purpose, art that 
has contented itself with reproducing the beauty 
of the human face and form, or the beauty of 
external nature. But the highest form of art 
is tragedy, epical or dramatic ; and the supreme 
tragedy is the good man suffering calamity. 
Eliminate the moral element from literature, 



212 THE FAITH OF REASON. 



and you rob Homer and Sophocles, Dante and 
Shakspere and Goethe, of the most fruitful sub- 
ject-matter of their art. 

Listening to the average pulpiteer, the aver- 
age moralist, you would suppose that the nature 
of morality was just as patent as the fact, and 
that the moral law was " the same yesterday, 
to-day, and forever;" that conscience always 
and everywhere dictated one and the same 
thing. But, in fact, there has been much con- 
flict not only between men unequally developed, 
but between equally good men, as to what is 
right and what is wrong; and there has been 
still more conflict in regard to the essential 
nature of these opposing facts. But never since 
the moral life of men began have thought and 
discussion been so active as they are to-day, 
concerning the essential nature of morality, its 
origin, its ground, its sanctions, and .so on. 
This activity results in a considerable degree 
from the break-down of supernatural religion, 
but in a more considerable degree from the 
aggressive energy of the evolutionary theory 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



213 



of human nature. Once let this theory pre- 
vail, urge its opponents, and there must be a 
ruinous catastrophe in the moral order of 
society. Ay, more: they say that this would 
already be upon us were not the Darwins and 
Spencers and Huxleys men of the most lofty 
personal character. And we are given to un- 
derstand that it is very mean of them to be 
so honorable and just. They have no right 
to be, consistently with their philosophy. But 
so long as they are so, either from force of 
habit, or to spite Mr. Mallock and his set, it 
will be much harder for them to excite the 
apprehensions of the community than it would 
be if the evolutionists were a pack of thieves, 
adulterers, and murderers. 

Somehow, — and in the discussion of the 
moral problem this is a crucial fact, — individ- 
ual morality is not exclusively dependent on 
the individual's theory of moral origins or 
sanctions. It is still possible for a man to live 
a moral life whether he is an intuitionalist or 
a utilitarian, a believer in necessity or in the 



214 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



freedom of the will, an advocate of the evolution 
or of the special creation of the human species. 
Mr. Mallock insists that Professor Tyndall 
ought to have a dirty mind ; but what is true so 
far is, that he has such a mind himself, while 
Professor Tyndall gives no sign, as yet, of 
following his example. But Professor Tyndall 
has other opponents whose wit is just as keen 
as Mr. Mallock's, without being as salacious. 
Best of all, it is quite as possible for a man to 
live a moral life without any general theory of 
morality, as to have his blood circulate in the 
most perfect manner without knowing any thing 
about Harvey's theory of its circulation, or any 
other. Of some of the best men who have 
lived it may be doubted whether they had a 
special theory of morals any more than Homer 
had a theory of the epic poem, or Shakspere 
a theory of the drama, or Burns a theory of the 
true genesis and composition of an immortal 
lyric. 

But while morality is possible, and this, too, 
of a high degree of excellence, without a definite 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



215 



theory of morals, it may be doubted whether 
any man was ever worse for trying to develop 
such a theory, however poorly he succeeded, 
so that his aim was simply to arrive at truth. 
If a man seeks a theory of morals that will 
afford an intellectual basis to a sensual or a 
selfish life, this is another matter. And while 
it is quite possible for a man to live nobly and 
grandly without any definite theory of morality, 
there are theories abroad which cannot be vitally 
appropriated without damage to the individual 
appropriating them. The man who strives 
persistently to educate his moral judgment, and 
who steadily endeavors to obey his moral 
impulses, can hardly miss the attainment of 
a lofty moral character; he cannot help going 
on and on to ever higher places. But even this 
man may be retarded in his motion by an 
atmosphere of thought or sentiment which he 
unconsciously inhales and against which he 
should be on his guard. Moreover, thought, 
the intellect, has it3 own rights, which ask for 
no ulterior sanction. Knowledge is an abso- 



2l6 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



lute good. Comte did not believe this, and 
would have had men abjure the study of side- 
real astronomy because such study was not 
apparently useful. Enough for us that its 
revelations thrill us through and through with 
awe and adoration. So w T ith the moral nature. 
We should want to fathom it, if the attempt 
left our moral vision exactly where it found it, 
clearing it no whit, nor adding one iota to the 
vigor of our wills. But the result is likely to 
be much more ample when the attempt is an 
unbiassed search for truth. 

The subject of our discussion presents a 
great variety of phases, but the most import- 
ant will, if I mistake not, fall under one or 
two general heads; namely, the origin and 
ground of moral distinctions, and the relation 
of our theoretic apprehensions of such origin 
and ground to the individual and social moral- 
ity of the present time. 

First, then, let us consider the origin and 
ground of moral distinctions. " Duty ! " ex- 
claims Immanuel Kant, " wondrous thought 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



217 



that workest neither by fond insinuation, flat- 
tery, nor any threat, but merely by upholding 
thy naked law to the soul, and so extorting 
for thyself always reverence, if not always 
obedience, — before whom all appetites are dumb, 
however secretly they rebel, — whence thy 
original ?" Jonathan Dymond, a Quaker linen- 
draper, wrote a book in his back-shop, im- 
proving the intervals between his infrequent 
customers, which book, " Essays on the Prin- 
ciples of Morality/' gives an unhesitating answer 
to Kant's passionate question, an answer mainly 
notable because it coincides with a very common 
opinion. Incidentally the book contains a great 
deal of excellent teaching; but I shall never 
forget the shock of disgust with which my 
mind revolted from its fundamental proposition, 
which is that the origin of moral distinctions 
is the will of God. God willed that some things 
should be right and others wrong, and therefore 
some things are right and others wrong. Here 
is a proposition in comparison with which 
John Stuart Mill's idea, that on some other 



2l8 THE FAITH OF REASON. 



planet two and two may possibly make five, 
seems truly admirable. If God had willed 
that murder, theft, adultery, and so on, should 
be right, they would have been. If he had 
willed that honesty, life-saving, chastity, and 
so on, should be wrong, they would have been 
forever. Did ever the assurance that might 
makes right receive a more significant illus- 
tration? But, as I have said, this conception 
of the Quaker moralist is far from being his 
peculiar property. It finds thousands of ad- 
mirers. And it is not an isolated conception. 
It is of a piece with a great multitude of con- 
ceptions which regard the laws and properties 
of matter as having been arbitrarily imposed 
by the Almighty. Thus God imposed on 
minerals their hardness, on water or gases their 
mobility, on lead its malleable quality, on mer- 
cury its exceeding instability. The word " law u 
has been the occasion of so much mischief in 
these matters that it is no wonder some scien- 
tific men have wished it might be banished for- 
ever from the realm of science. This word 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



219 



has been interpreted by analogy with the laws 
which kings and parliaments impose upon their 
subjects. Just as these kings and parliaments 
impose laws upon their people, the Almighty 
is supposed to have imposed laws upon matter. 
But the truth is that there is no analogy between 
the laws of nature and the laws of kings and 
states. The laws of matter are resident in its 
fundamental properties; and its properties are 
fundamental. It is simply impossible to con- 
ceive of matter without properties or of nature 
without laws. It is sheer nonsense to talk 
about God's imposing properties on matter, and 
laws upon nature. Matter without properties 
and nature without laws are figments of the 
metaphysical and theological brain. 

Now, as I have said, the notion that moral 
distinctions originate in the will of God is of 
a piece with these conceptions of natural prop- 
erties and natural laws. It is a notion of sheer 
arbitrariness. It makes the distinction between 
right and wrong a purely arbitrary distinction. 
The distinction may still be regarded as eternal 



220 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



by supposing it to have been " decreed from 
all eternity," but if " the eternal difference be- 
tween right and wrong" of which we hear so 
much means nothing more than this, it might 
date from yesterday as well. What we want 
is that the distinction should be genuine, that 
it should be real, that it should inhere in the 
natural relationships of actions, that it should be 
no veneer or varnish, but in the grain of things. 
Convince me that the distinction between good 
and evil actions is a purely arbitrary distinction, 
and fear of God may lead me to prefer the good 
and shun the evil; but there would be as little 
virtue in the former course as in the latter. 

There have not, at any time, been wanting 
those who have clearly perceived the arbitrary 
nature of morality which has no other basis 
than the will of God, and these have endeavored 
to relieve it of its arbitrary character by imput- 
ing to the Almighty an ulterior motive. Our 
present life, they say, is a probation for another 
and a higher state of existence. The day of 
judgment is a competitive examination for ad- 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



221 



mission to this higher state. We are fitting all 
our lives long for this examination. Morality 
is the curriculum arranged with reference to 
our probationary condition. The distinctions of 
right and wrong and the difference in actions 
have been created in order to furnish this cur- 
riculum. But by this subterfuge the arbitrary 
character of moral distinctions is in no wise 
affected. They remain as arbitrary as ever. 
They are still imposed; not necessary and 
essential. There is no more divinity in the 
atoms than there was before. In fact, to the 
first arbitrary distinction is now added a second. 
The relation of this probationary condition to 
a future state is purely arbitrary. No reason 
is given why the probation for a life of infinite 
duration should be limited to an average of 
some five and thirty years. All the reasons 
are opposed to any such arrangement. All 
the reasons are in favor of some natural and 
genetic relation between the life which now is 
and that which is to come. In short, we have 
here no rational account of moral distinctions. 



222 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



It is the old, old story of the earth, the elephant, 
the tortoises. We want to know what the four 
tortoises are resting on; why actions are dis- 
tinguished as good or bad; why some things 
are right and others wrong. 

The transcendental moralist holds a position 
antipodal to that which I have been exhibiting. 
He contends that there is actually as well as 
formally an eternal difference between right 
and wrong. These are not mere names to 
him; they are things. God does not make 
certain actions right and others wrong by his 
divine decree. Rightness and wrongness inhere 
in actions, — in their most secret essence. Some 
things are right and other things are wrong in 
themselves. The first breath of this transcen- 
dental air is very inspiring if one enters it from 
the side of those arbitrary distinctions, which 
are not really differences, which we have been 
considering. But after a little while it proves 
as much too thin as that was too thick and 
heavy. We have escaped from mere arbitra- 
riness into mere logomachy. To assert that 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



223 



the moral difference in actions is an essential 
difference, a difference in themselves, is to assert 
nothing. It is to fool ourselves with words. 
To call this difference an eternal difference is 
high-sounding and imposing, but it is absurd. 
There were no actions in the original fire-mist 
out of which all things have been evolved. 
Actions imply men. There must be men 
before there can be actions. But suppose — a 
reasonable supposition — there have been men 
here on the earth five hundred thousand years. 
This is a practical eternity. If certain actions 
have differed all this time as right and wrong, 
is it not allowable to say that the difference 
between them is an eternal difference? It might 
be if they had differed so. But they have not. 
Actions that are not right in one age or con- 
dition of society are right in another. The 
moral difference of actions is not a difference 
which can be estimated apart from the social 
order for the time being. Plants and animals 
can be assigned to this class or that, according 
as they have certain definite characteristics. 



224 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

But it is not so with moral actions. Actions 
as nearly similar as may be are sometimes right 
and sometimes wrong. 

And, mind you, what I mean is not that they 
are subjectively so. This is, no doubt, a truth, 
but it is a truth which has been tremendously 
over-emphasized, and the result has been that 
the objective Tightness and wrongness have been 
overlooked. The inward disposition is much, 
but it is not every thing. And the presumption 
that it is every thing has been the fruitful 
mother of innumerable ills. It has prevented 
men's considering the consequences of their 
actions, as well as the purity of their intentions. 
It has blinded men to the New Testament prin- 
ciple, " No man liveth to himself, and no man 
dieth to himself. ,, Jesus said that " Whosoever 
looketh on a woman to lust after her hath 
committed adultery already in his heart." But 
it makes a mighty difference to the social order 
whether a man stops at this point, or goes on 
to actualize his wicked thought. It makes a 
mighty difference to him. And this difference 



CONCERNING MORALS. 22$ 

is one which cannot be too much insisted on. 
It is not enough that a man should do what 
he thinks is right. He must do what is right. 
For the wrong action ignorantly done brings 
in its train hardly less ruin of the social order 
than the most wilful sin. George Eliot has 
done no better service than in her showing of 
the remorseless penalties that wait on the good- 
natured weakness and mistaken virtue of man- 
kind. " Danton, no weakness/' said that giant 
of the revolution, as he drew near the guillotine. 
" No weakness ! " That will be every man's 
motto who is persuaded that the motives do 
not trammel up the consequences of the act, 
and that the objective force of actions can in 
no wise be measured by their subjective crim- 
inality. 

But this is episodical. It was suggested by 
the assertion that actions as nearly similar as 
possible are sometimes right and sometimes 
wrong. Why are they so over and above all 
reference to their subjective character? Because 
the greatest good of the greatest number of actual 



226 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



or prospective individuals in the community, at 
any given time, is the end of all morality \ and 
this end requires at certain stages in the evolu- 
tion of society a line of action which at certain 
other stages would be prejudicial. It does this 
because human nature and its environment are 
not constants but variable quantities, and con- 
sequently that relative harmony between the 
two which is essential to the best condition of 
society is secured by different actions at differ- 
ent stages of development. 

This, then, is the ground of moral difference. 
The most useful action, this is the most right; 
the most useless or anti-useful, this is the most 
wrong. That the greatest good of the greatest 
number possible is the summum bonum, the 
highest possible good of society considered as 
a whole, would be a self-evident proposition if 
any thing could be. The highest possible good 
of any individual is certainly his greatest good. 
So then of every individual, and therefore of 
society at large. There are those who seem to 
think "the greatest good of the greatest num- 



CONCERNING MORALS. 22>] 

ber " a selfish proposition. Why not, they say, 
the greatest good of all? But here the part is 
greater than the whole. The greatest number 
includes all if possible. If the greatest good 
is not possible for all, then, evidently, the great- 
est good of the greatest number is the next 
best thing. 

Such being the highest good — the fullest life, 
the most and purest pleasure and the least 
possible pain for the greatest number possible 
— and every action being right or wrong just in 
proportion as it contributes towards this highest 
good, how do we come to the conclusion that 
it is the ditty of the individual to seek this 
highest good? To ask this question is to pass 
from the objective to the subjective side of our 
great theme. Duty and Ought are the great 
words of morality. They have exactly the same 
meaning. Duty is that which is due. The 
ought is that which is owed. Indeed the word 
" ought " is but an obsolete form of the word 
" owed." In Tyndale's version of the Gospels 
we read, " There was a certain lender which 



228 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

ought him five hundred pence." Now, if the 
true morality were simply the seeking of one's 
private happiness, as some Utilitarians have 
contended, I do not see that there would be any 
place in such morality for these great words. 
When George Eliot says of Captain Wybrow 
that he " did what was pleasant and agreeable 
to him from a sense of duty," she writes one 
of the most biting sarcasms ever written. So 
long as a man is doing merely what is pleasant 
and agreeable to him, and making this the end 
of his morality, the sense of duty has no fellow- 
ship with him. When we speak of a man's 
owing such and such things to himself, we are 
generally excusing his selfishness, or justifying 
his extravagance, or implying that he owes some- 
thing to other people. The words " ought " 
and " duty " have no place in the scheme of 
individual hedonism, the pursuit of individual 
happiness as the highest good. Their only 
rightful place is in that universal hedonism 
which seeks the greatest good of the greatest 
number. But why ought the individual to seek 



CONCERNING MORALS. 229 

the greatest good of all ? Because it is self- 
evident that every other individual has an equal 
right with him to the highest possible good. 
But right and duty are but different sides of 
one stupendous fact. Every man's right is all 
men's duty; and, conversely, all men's right 
is every individual's duty. The right of all 
men to the greatest possible good, the fullest 
possible life, demonstrates the duty of each 
individual to seek the highest good of all. 

And is this the Utilitarianism which is so 
often spoken of in terms of pity and contempt? 
No, this is the Utilitarianism which is so miscon- 
ceived that men speak of their misconception 
in such terms, as well they may. If the only 
Utilitarianism were that which prizes all things 
at their money value, then, indeed, it might 
well merit all the scorn that men could heap 
upon it. Or if the only Utilitarianism were 
that which leads the individual to seek his 
individual happiness, then would the word 
" Utilitarianism " be one of the largest words 
for one of the smallest things under the cope 



23O THE FAITH OF REASON. 

of heaven. But because Utilitarianism, as con- 
ceived by all its best expositors, is that system 
of morality which makes the greatest good of 
the greatest number the necessary goal .of 
individual effort, those who call themselves 
Utilitarians have no need to apologize for their 
creed. Rather they ought to hesitate before 
they dare count themselves worthy to be mar- 
shalled under such a flag. There is no taint 
of selfishness or sordidness in such a creed. 
There is no possible splendor of self-sacrifice 
which cannot find full room to exercise itself 
within its ample scope. 

Compare the Utilitarian ground of moral 
distinctions, as thus conceived, with that of 
Jonathan Dymond and his school, — the will of 
God. It may not sound so fine to ears attuned 
to theological phrases and to these alone, but 
it differs from it as reality differs from a hollow 
show. One says that might makes right, the 
other that use makes right, the highest use, the 
fullest possible life of the greatest number of 
mankind. Compare this Utilitarian ground of 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



231 



moral distinctions with the high-sounding tran- 
scendental dictum, We should do right because 
it is right. There is a meaning of these words 
which God forbid we should not honor with 
our deepest admiration, a meaning which every 
true man can cordially agree to, for it is that 
we are not to do right from ulterior, selfish 
motives. We are not to do right through any 
hope of heaven, or any fear of hell, — through 
any zeal sectarian or partisan, or with any view 
of increasing our own reputation, popularity, or 
wealth. But in all strictness, this expression, 
" We should do right because it is right/' is 
an identical proposition; that is, it predicates 
nothing. The predicate is but a repetition of 
the subject, as if one should say, " A horse is 
a horse." As a formula of moral philosophy, 
as expressive of the ground of right action, this 
identical proposition is of no account. There 
would be no special virtue in doing a thing 
because it is right, if this word " right " did not 
have a definite meaning. The right is that 
which is most useful to humanity. What is 



232 THE FAITH OF REASON, 

the most useful, mankind has been trying to 
discover these half-million years, and it has 
got a little way, but it has a long, long way 
to go. 

It is suggested that the transcendental dictum, 
"We should do right because it is right," has 
about it an air of mystery which is indispensable 
to ethical authority. But mystery, which is 
the outcome of mere ignorance and negation, 
does not appeal to rational men with any ges- 
ture of authority. The mystery which has this 
gesture, and a voice to match, is the mystery 
of an order of development so vast that we 
can only apprehend some little segment of it 
here and there; we cannot trace its infinite 
parabola. If in its practical working the out- 
come of Utilitarianism were that every individ- 
ual should begin de novo, and elaborate for 
himself a scheme of uses and look up to his 
scheme as his authority, I grant you that 
there would be something petty in his attitude. 
There would be a lack of noble mystery per- 
taining to his sense of duty. It would not be 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



233 



natural for such a man to respond very deeply 
to Wordsworth's " Ode to Duty," to say to 
her, — 

" Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and 
strong." 

" But," as one of your own prophets hath said, 
" let us take into account the great principle 
" of heredity ; let the sense of utility, of the 
" needs of society, of the demands which the 
" whole makes upon each part, have gathered 
" strength through innumerable generations ; let 
" all irregularities of time and place be elimi- 
" nated from the result, because such irregu- 
" larities will go for nothing in the great mass ; 
" and let the combined, intensified, and puri- 
" fied result enter into the constitution of the 
" individual ; let it be born with him, and 
" twined with every fibre of his brain," and 
we should then have "the elements of a 
" mysterious authority, whose decisions are not 
" to be questioned or explained, which acts 
" from the depth of nature, and which thus 



234 THE FAITH 0F REASON. 

" represents the categorical imperative that we 
" seek." 1 

And if, in its latest stages, Utilitarian mo- 
rality does not imply that every moral act is 
based upon an individual calculation of the 
relation of such an act to the greatest good of 
the greatest number, still less does it imply 
this in its earliest stages. No wonder that 
Utilitarianism seems absurd when it is conceived 
as picturing the primeval savage debating with 
himself whether the act to which he is impelled 
has in it the quality of universal usefulness. 
No wonder that it still seems absurd when our 
present moral intuitions are regarded as the 
outcome of innumerable conscious generaliza- 
tions in the past, transmitted to us along the 
lines of our hereditary qualities. But these 
are men of straw, set up by stealth with a view 
to being demolished with great public distinc- 
tion. The true Utilitarian does not imagine 

1 The New Ethics, by Professor C. C. Everett, of the 
Divinity School, Harvard University ; — an exceedingly sugges- 
tive and comprehensive article in the Unitarian Review, Octo- 
ber, 1878. 



CONCERNING MORALS. 235 

that the primeval savage consciously presented 
to himself either the idea of general or individ- 
ual use. Given that " stream of tendency in 
virtue of which every thing tends to fulfil the 
law of its being," — given this stream, not in 
an isolated individual, but in a multitude of 
individuals living together and forming a so- 
ciety, — and immediately the desires begin to 
clash. Two men want the same thing. They 
cannot both have it. On every side man finds 
his impulses checked and thwarted by his fellow- 
man. So long as men attempt to act out these 
impulses freely, without regard to each other, 
life is intolerable, full of violence and robbery 
and domestic anarchy. Instead of fulfilling 
the law of their being, men find that they are 
standing in each other's way; that, so long as 
it is every man for himself, the devil takes, 
not merely the hindmost, but almost everybody. 
And hence arises the perception — a perception 
instinctive and unconscious — that, in a world 
where much is wanted, much must be re- 
signed; that men need each other; that there 



236 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



is a "law of liberty." This law of liberty is 
the moral law, the perception of which, with 
the corresponding sense that it must be obeyed, 
is conscience, — con-science, that which men 
know together. How many confluents, from 
first to last, flow into this before the tiny stream 
becomes a mighty river, fertilizing history for 
ages down with its unfailing flood ! Darwin's 
gregariousness is no doubt its fountain-head. 
If man were not a social animal, if he could 
live apart from all his kind, the stress of cir- 
cumstances would not develop the law of liberty 
and tire corresponding moral sense. It is only 
when men live together, and begin to suffer 
inconvenience from the free and unrestrained 
exercise of each other's wills, that the sense 
of mutual obligation is developed. 

What more natural than that sympathy, sun- 
pathos, common feeling, should be immensely 
productive of conscience, conscience, common 
knowledge, men's knowledge of the principles 
which ought to regulate their common life? 
Sympathy, the power of ideally presenting to 



CONCERNING MORALS. 237 

one's self the feelings of another person, was 
never better indicated than in that pathetic sen- 
tence of Eugenie de Guerin, " I feel a pain in 
my brother's side." Many such pains went to 
the shaping of the moral sense of the primeval 
man. In his dealings with others he found him- 
self avoiding those things which gave him pain, 
doing the things which would allay its smart, 
praising those persons who avoided hurtful 
things, and blaming those who did not avoid 
them, and so on. Thus praise and blame be- 
gan to play their part, a mighty one it has 
since proved, in strengthening in men's minds 
the sense of mutual obligation. 

Well said the Psalmist, " Out of the mouths 
of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained 
praise," for to the feebleness of human infancy 
more than to any other cause are we apparently 
indebted for the placing of " the solitary in 
families," the strengthening of domestic ties. 
If it had been possible to " cast the bantling 
on the rocks," the genesis of the family would 
seemingly have been impossible. But, as it 



238^ THE FAITH OF REASON. 

was, those tiny hands, "with love's invisible 
sceptre laden," held father and mother together 
till, through force of habit, they became neces- 
sary to each other's happiness, and permanent 
family relations were thus engendered. So out 
of the physical weakness and consequent pro- 
longation of human infancy, as distinguished 
from that of other primates, was perfected the 
moral strength of " the first families " of prim- 
itive civilization, developing in time into that 
of the clan and tribe, and then, with ever- 
widening sympathy, at last into "the enthusiasm 
for humanity." * 

Do not imagine that in this process of evo- 
lution from mere gregariousness to - universal 
philanthropy there has been no admixture of 
unreal and superstitious elements. The senti- 
ment of Duty, of the Ought, — that which is 
owed, — has received immense accession from 
the apotheosis of the chief and king, henceforth 
conceived as the legislator and executor of 
those moral laws which are the expressions 
of the average sense of the community as to 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



239 



what lines of conduct are most conducive to 
the general good. If this were the whole story, 
how different the history of humanity would 
have been ! But, alas ! the imaginary gods 
have also been conceived as claiming for them- 
selves hundreds of duties over and above the 
claims of men upon each other. To this day 
men conceive that they have innumerable duties 
to God which are in no sense duties which 
they owe each other. Indeed, now, as always, 
the imaginary duty to God is often in direct 
conflict with the obvious duty to mankind. If 
all the strength which, from the beginning, has 
gone to men's imaginary duties to God, could 
have gone to their obvious and acknowledged 
duties to each other, how different would be 
the aspect of our race to-day ! 

Professor Everett says, " If the new morality 
" would in any sense replace the old, it must be 
" shown to have at least the authority of an* 
" instinct." Such an authority is claimed for 
it by its most competent expositors, and I 
have given you an inkling of the method of 



240 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

their proof. It disposes for ever of the imagi- 
nary Utilitarian, debating, on the threshold of 
each separate action, its probable effect upon 
the greatest good of the greatest number. It 
disposes for ever of the conception of Utilitarian 
morality as the hereditary sum-total of the 
reasoned results of by-gone generations in re- 
gard to what constitutes the greatest good of 
the greatest number. But what is true is, that 
our modern conscience is the product of in- 
numerable instinctive efforts of past generations 
to adjust the units of society in such relative 
positions as should give rise to the least possible 
friction, the utmost fulness of life. " The expe- 
" riences of utility organized and consolidated 
" through all past generations of the human 
" race have been producing corresponding mod- 
" ifications, which by transmission and accu- 
" mulation have become in us certain faculties 
" of moral intuition." 1 

So much for the origin and ground of the 
distinctions between right and wrong. These 
1 Herbert Spencer. 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



241 



distinctions are not merely nominal. They are 
real; they are inseparable from the social life 
of man. Given men living in society, and 
there must be such distinctions. Nor are we 
put off any longer with identical propositions. 
To do right because it is right, has still a 
glorious meaning, but it gives no reason why 
we should do right, nor any intimation in what 
the right consists. The ethics of evolution do 
give such a reason, — do furnish such an inti- 
mation. The intimation is, that right is the 
science necessary to the art of living together ; 
the reason is, that, as all owe us the practice 
of this art, so we owe it to all. 

And now, very briefly, let us consider the re- 
lation of this theory of morals to the individual 
and social morality of the present time. Where 
shall men go to find the separate precepts of 
this Utilitarian morality? The happy people 
who believe that moral distinctions originate 
in the will of God generally believe, at the 
same time, that the Bible is a revelation of the 
will of God. Here is their moral code. Here, 



242 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

but where? In the Old Testament or the New? 
In the Proverbs or the Psalms? In the Gospels 
or Epistles? Where the injunctions are easiest, 
or where they are the hardest? As a rule, 
where they are easiest. Men never tire of 
talking very sweetly about the Sermon on the 
Mount. They never think of realizing its 
injunctions in their personal concerns. But 
even if we believed the will of God to be the 
source of moral distinctions, we could not 
accept the Bible as a revelation of his will. W e 
do not know who wrote the most of it, or when 
it w T as written, and the writers seldom claim, 
and never show, a supernatural inspiration. 
Where then shall the Utilitarian moralist go 
to find the separate precepts of the code he is 
to follow? To Herbert Spencer or John Stuart 
Mill? They have not deigned to furnish us 
with such a code. And there was little need 
for them to do so. The word is very near us, 
even in our hearts. The experience of the ages 
is organized in us. And it is also organized 
in other men and women everywhere about 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



243' 



us, in some much more perfectly than in 
others, and in hundreds of great poems and 
noble books. Therefore it is that in the great 
majority of cases we have no doubt whatever 
what we ought to do. If we should stop to 
analyze the moral laws which, at every turn, 
claim our obedience, we should find that every 
one of them is a rough expression of Utilitarian 
considerations. But these laws appeal to us, 
not as useful, but as right. Only when the 
element of doubt comes in, and any law that 
claims obedience has to be tested, do we per- 
ceive that utility is the basis of right, the widest 
possible utility. All do not pursue this method. 
Some appeal to the Bible, — now for some right- 
eous cause, and anon for an excuse to take 
a little wine for their stomach's sake, or to 
gag a woman with a text, or to send back a 
fugitive slave ; and all do not apply the standard 
of the widest possible utility. They would 
have their party or their country flourish at 
the expense of those beyond ; and so they 
institute protective tariffs and prohibit foreign 
immigration. This is the morality of the clan. 



244 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



Jesus said, " Unless your righteousness ex- 
ceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you 
shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of 
God." And yet the Scribes and Pharisees 
were the most righteous people of his time. 
There is a suggestion here, that a much higher 
morality is still possible for mankind than that 
demanded by our present intuitions. The 
inter-adjustments of society are still far enough 
from being perfect. But the more perfect 
adjustment will not come from the side of 
rampant individualism. The passion for free- 
dom has done a great and glorious work, and 
it has still much to do. But there is less hope 
for humanity in this passion than in the willing- 
ness to be greatly bound, — the willingness to 
subordinate individual comfort and desire to 
an extended common good. 

Because the measure of morality is the 
greatest good of the greatest number, there 
are those who seem to think that a Utilitarian 
must try to spread himself in the thinnest 
possible layer over the surface of humanity, or 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



245 



that he must neglect his morning errands for 
the claims of Borroboolagha. But no: the 
best expositors of our creed assure us that we 
can best assist the good of all by doing our 
most obvious duty in the sphere of our im- 
mediate relationships of love and labor. 

A great deal is said of sanctions of morality, 
a great deal more than would be if men were 
deeply impressed with the Utilitarian idea. 
This seeking for sanctions, — what is it for the 
most part but an unconscious confession that 
the law of right contains no reason in itself 
why it should be obeyed? To the trained 
Utilitarian it is a sufficient sanction of morality 
that it is the bond of social order, the means 
of realizing the fullest possible life of the com- 
munity. Of those who have much to say about 
moral sanctions, that is, reasons why we should 
obey the moral law, many are continually 
assuring us that morality acquires all its value 
and sacredness from the idea of immortality, 
the relation of this life to another. Take 
away immortality, they say, and there is no 



246 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



reason why a man should try to do his duty; 
and yet the very men who talk in this manner 
accuse Utilitarian morality of selfishness. Was 
ever a more flagrant* instance of the pot calling 
the kettle black? Only the kettle in this 
instance is an imaginary kettle. The real one 
is not black. The real Utilitarian, the universal 
hedonist, is not selfish in his theory of life. To 
live for all is surely not the creed of selfishness. 
But what shall we say to this idea that without 
immortality there is no reason why a man should 
do his duty? This: that such an idea is a 
degradation of both immortality and morality. 
This also : that the idea is absurd. If I were 
a day-fly I would get as much as possible into 
my day. Though we should have our be-all 
and our end-all here, morality would still be 
the means of assuring the greatest good of the 
greatest number. I have heard of a child who 
had an apple in each hand, to whom a third 
was offered. Whereupon, unable to grasp it, 
he threw down the two he had, and burst into 
a flood of tears. Was it a true story, or only 



CONCERNING MORALS. 247 

a witty parable of the popular religionist, who, 
with his hands full of benefits, throws them 
away, and bursts into a baby's cry because he 
cannot grasp the fruit of immortality ? 

" Is there no second life? Pitch this one 
high." Is this a familiar quotation? It cannot 
be too familiar. A man does not deserve the 
hope of immortality who cannot put it to a bet- 
ter use than this of a mere bribe to human self- 
ishness ; and what is more, when morality is so 
degraded, the noblest argument for immortality 
is gone. For what is this but the inconceiv- 
ability of the extinction of an unselfish soul? 
But the extinction of such worms and flies as 
men would be who could not keep the moral 
law but for the prize of immortality, is by no 
means inconceivable. 

Again, it is insisted that without a dogmatic 
belief in a personal God morality is impossible. 
But Benedict Spinoza, the God of whose belief 
was certainly not personal, in any ordinary 
meaning of the word, had such a genius for 
morality as few other men have had in all the 



248 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



history of thought. I yield to no man in the 
depth and joy of my assurance of an Infinite 
Life which men call God, as good a name as 
any for the Unnamable. But I rejoice to see 
that the moral law is so deeply implicated in 
the structure of society that it does not depend 
for its authority or sanction upon any theory 
of the Infinite, or even upon any conscious 
theistic affirmation. 

" Sits there no judge in heaven our sin to see ? 
More strictly then the inward judge obey." 

Here is this world, — this human world, — and, 
God or no God, morality is the art of life, the 
necessary condition of the greatest good of the 
greatest number. Is it, as pessimism thinks, 
the worst possible world? If so, without a 
God, then let us make the best of it we can, 
and better it a little for the men and women 
who will live when we are dead and gone. If 
with a God, then, in all reverence, as Hartmann 
thinks, we must pity him, poor God ! and do 
our best to take a little from his pain, 



CONCERNING MORALS, 249 
" Forgive these wild and wandering cries." 

They do but hide under their seeming blas- 
phemy the strength of our inalienable con- 
viction that morality is too deeply implicated 
in the life of man to be at the mercy of any 
theory or no-theory of God or the immortal 
life. Whenever two or three or more are 
gathered together, there is the Holy Spirit, 
conscience, in the midst of them. 

And is there, then, no point of contact 
between morality and worship, the sense of 
duty and the sense of God? I have not said 
this, and I do not believe it. I believe with 
Matthew Arnold, that there is a power, not 
ourselves, that makes for righteousness. And 
by " ourselves " I do not mean just our 
immediate selves. I mean all men and women 
that ever lived. I believe there is an eternal 
power not ourselves that makes for righteous- 
ness, eternal in no metaphorical sense, but 
absolutely eternal. I believe that this power 
not ourselves is the Infinite Being, God. I 
believe that Wordsworth wrote, .not merely 



250 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



poetry, but truth when he wrote, as I have 
quoted once already, apostrophizing duty, — 

" Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and 
strong." 

Why, but because it is the same infinite power 
" whose pulses wave-like beat on shore of sun 
and star and still flow on from heaven to heaven 
everlastingly/' whose genius is more grandly 
evident in the out-goings of the moral life of 
man? There is no break in the long line of 
evolution. 

" The world was once a fluid haze of light, 
Till toward the centre set the starry tides 
And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast 
The planets ; then the monster ; then the man." 

And man discovered in himself an impulse to 
morality. He discovered it. He did not in- 
vent it. 

" God kindly gave his blood a moral flow." 

And so morality becomes religious. Without 
consciously affirming God, a man may still be 
moral. But without the God whom some 



CONCERNING MORALS. 2$ I 

cannot affirm, there could be no morality, no 
man, no universe. 

Men have conceived themselves as having 
duties to God which are in no wise duties to 
man. But the new ethics recognize no such 
duties. The catalogue is exhausted by our 
duties to each other and our poor relations, 
the dumb animals as we call them, because 
we do not understand their speech any better 
than they do ours. I sometimes wonder if they 
think us also dumb. But though our Utilitarian 
morality recognizes no separate duty to God, 
it recognizes joyfully that all our duties to each 
other are equally duties to him, his dues, that 
which we owe to him. For see, the All is for 
each one of us. And what is the inevitable 
response of any earnest heart that knows and 
feels the truth of this, — that all is so for each, 
that One, the Infinite, is so for all? What can 
it be but, Each for all, Each for the Infinite 
One. So grandly helped, we long to help in 
turn. But how? We cannot make the sun any 
brighter, or the sky any bluer, or the ocean or 



252 THE FAITH OF REASON. 

the mountains any more sublime. Here and 
there we can make the earth a little greener, 
fairer; perhaps make such a flower to bloom 
as God has never seen before in all the eternal 
years. But this is not enough. We must do 
more than this; and the way is always clear; 
the gate is always open. It is to lend a hand, — 
to do what in us lies to make life happier, 
sweeter, cleaner, brighter, holier, diviner, for 
those with whom we mingle in the various 
activities of life and love, and those who will 
succeed to our inheritance of beauty, truth, and 
good. Thus worship at its best becomes 
morality, while, at the same time, morality 
becomes religion, all duties to our fellow-men 
becoming duties to Him who, 

1 be he what he may, 
Is yet the fountain light of all our day, 
Is yet the master light of all our seeing. , 

And this is " mere morality.'' Oh, long 
despised, the day is drawing nigh when men 
shall see that thou art the most beautiful and 
strong and grandly dowered of all the masters 



CONCERNING MORALS. 



253 



of the world ! Thou art the builder and pre- 
server of all families and states. Thou art the 
joy and confidence of all the earth. There is 
no happiness like thine, albeit it is " a sort of 
" happiness which often brings so much pain with 
" it that we can only tell it from pain by its 
" being that which we would choose before every 
" thing else, because our souls see it to be good. ,, 

Thou whose name is blazoned forth 

On our banner's gleaming fold, 
Freedom ! thou whose sacred worth 

Never yet has half been told ! 
Often have we sung of thee, 
Dear to us as dear can be. 

But to-day we sing of one 

Older, graver far than thou ; 
With the seal of time begun 

Stamped upon her awful brow. 
Freedom, latest born of time, 
Knowest thou her form sublime ? 

She is Duty ; in her hand 

•Is a sceptre, heaven-wrought ; 
Hers the accent of command ; 

Hers the dreadful, mystic Ought ; 
Hers upon us all to lay 
Heavier burdens every day. 



254 



THE FAITH OF REASON. 



But her bondage is so sweet ! 

And her burdens make us strong ; 
Wings they seem to weary feet, 

Laughter to our lips and song. 
Freedom, make us free to speed 
Wheresoever she may lead! 

February 23, 1879. 



University Press : John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. 



